Thanks for the pointer. This is only roughly what I meant and I'd agree ecs
would not really make things easier than jsp.
But your message made me have a closer look to the other projects under
jakarta. Tapestry seems to be the thing  I was looking for.

Andreas

Ecs is suitable to render html if you develop web-controls. It is not
exactly helping out much if you want to develop web-apps using
web-controls, being pretty low level. It's a little more cumbersome than
writing the html in a jsp or servlet, but gives you compile-time
error-messages (which a jsp-compiler may also be able to provide).

There are literally hundreds of web-control projects out there being
much more geared towards development of web-applications and not
web-application frameworks and web-controls.

WingZ and a couple of others use html to render Swing applications on
the web, Millstone is a very component-oriented framework (albeit not
being very active developed these days, it seems, but that goes for ecs
as well ...). Struts is the defacto standard, but the controls are
implemented as taglibs and you still program the view in a markup
language (jsp with struts tags), you get lots and lots of useful support
for handling all the tedious nuts and bolts involved in web application
programming. Sun JSF is Suns attempt to standardize the java web-gui
beyond jsp. The list is really much, much longer ...