Thank you -eetow  your post was quite insightful and appreciate taking the time to type all that out.

I do have a little bit of .Net experience and everything seemed integrated with MS products but Java seems to overwhelm me with so many technologies...haha

Let me ask another follow up question, I am right now learning a little bit of struts 1.x and already 2.x seems a little different in its implementation. How does it par with other frameworks like Hibernate and Spring. Also, is it easier learning those once I learn struts or am in compraring apples to oranges ? Every job description has Hibernate, Spring etc.