I found this free e-book which describes some web development frameworks for Java developers. These frameworks are like those of event driven GUI applications. However they sometimes have steep learning curves. Java provides some web technology. But it does not provide a web application framework. So these third party frameworks have come about to help you with the low level tasks.Struts is the most well known framework. It is well documented and has a large following. A drawback of using struts are the big configuration files. You need to use a lot of XML markup files for forms and rendering. I hear that developers are moving away from this framework in general.
Java Server Faces (JSF) is another framework. It runs on an application server like WebSphere. It strives to decouple the components and the view. The most frequently used implementation of JSF is Apache's MyFaces. JSF uses a managed bean to store user info. The bean classes contains the logic. This technology is backed by big companies like the former Sun Microsystems. A few years back I did hear that JSF might not be appropriate for mission critical applications. Not sure whether this opinion has since changed yet.
