it seems that appfuse has a competitor
This blog post is ancient. If it is technical, the information is likely inaccurate, or at least out of date. If it is non-technical, it’s entirely possible that the relevant facts and my own opinions have changed significantly since it was written.
It is only preserved as part of this site’s permanent historical archive.
I found Project Able while reading Raible’s blog this morning. While it doesn’t claim to duplicate everything that AppFuse does (i.e. they pick a framework and stick with it instead of providing choice), they are doing some neat things. I may take a look at it if I ever have time. 
Project Able is a full Java-based web development stack designed to make web development painless. In a sense, it is an attempt to bring together quality opensource tools in one cohesive stack, similar to what Rails has done for Ruby, while also encouraging common practices I’ve used in software engineering for a long time.
It is very similar to projects such as Trails, Grails, and AppFuse. However, there are a few key differences:
- The stack components are different (WebWork, Spring, iBatis, etc).
- In addition to the basic framework, Able also encourages common development techniques and patterns (more below).