I'm fairly new at webapp development in Java and have been looking around for a decent tutorial on this subject. I've found a whole bunch of frameworks from struts to seam. Which framework should I look at considering my level of expertise in this area is fairly low?
Also is there a global tutorial on web application fundamentals?
Java EE tutorial covers the basics of web applications.
As far as frameworks go, take a look at this question
I would suggest to learn Seam as it builds further on JSF, an industry standard. It is also one of the newer and better web application frameworks available in the Java landscape today. Furthermore, it has great support for both EJB3 and simple pojo development.
You should also do some background reading about servlets.
I cannot help you with Java, but here is a link to an excellent SO post that will help you with the second question.
If you want something easy for web applications development I would highly recommend grails. Other frameworks are good but learning curve and configuration complexity is high. Most of the time you will find against them.
With Grails you will have application up and running in few minutes.
I'd focus on learning HTTP/HTML first - you need to know the basics of static web development before building dynamic web applications.
Then just do some basic Servlets and JSPs - all other Java web frameworks are built on this - and if you jump right into higher level frameworks, sooner or later you're going to run into an issue you need to debug / develop that's going to require knowledge of how the underlying servlet / JSP APIs work.
After you learn the basics start looking at other frameworks built on top of this to see what they offer.
