As part of my research last week, I was reading up on Java frameworks - such as Struts and Hibernate.

As it's been a while since I've looked into these things, I found the Wikipedia articles to be really useful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Struts

They give you a "skim" along the top, without having to delve too deep. They also give you the links to the underlying raw material.

I used a "homegrown" framework, loosely based on other "homegrown" frameworks from systems I've worked on in the past.

Reading about all these other frameworks made me feel slightly depressed - the effort of learning them, the petty problems and then the difficulty in making them do exactly what you want.

I find making my own framework to be so much more rewarding. You learn a great deal in the process of building it, and then you really understand how it works when you apply it to a particular system.

I know the downside that is new developers have to come to grips with how you've done things. But then maybe they'll learn something - as I have done from others' frameworks.