Updaters/Administration Pages

[Ethan Schroeder]

I'm relatively new to java web programming, so I would like some input from other more experience users.  I've been doing web development for quite some time now, and over the years have developed a large codebase consisting of a lot of administration/updater functionality.  It seems most of the work I end up doing is writing admin pages which do basic updating of text in a database to be displayed to users in a display page.  Apps like headline/news pages, employment listings, and other updatable components come to mind in the types of "updaters" I end up doing a lot.  Right now I can whip these things out very quickly due to nearly self generating code and object-based form elements which are extremely easy to configure.   My question to all the seasoned java web developers is this: What do you do for the smaller "administration" applications?  What technologies do you use? Custom systems?  Open source projects?  Straight servlet/jsp?  MVC?  Frameworks like Struts?  I have been learning Model 2 development, which seems very good for larger applications but almost overkill for the smaller ones.  I have a ton of different technologies rolling around in my head, but what I don't have is a clear understanding of how people do these things in the "real" java world.   What I want out of java is the ability to construct a repository of applications I have to write all the time.  These apps hardly ever change in concept, but they always need to be tweaked for each project.  I want to reduce/eliminate code shuffling.  I also would like to have extensible and very configurable applications which can be rolled out very quickly.   Thanks for any input.