Being in an investigate/document/read mood these last days, and trying to figure out a good answer to Tim’s question: What Web Application framework should you use? and Matt’s answer, I’ve given a short read to Stripes documentation.
And I must confess that at first glance I like it. It may sound weird comming from an WebWork/SAF developer, but hey, I am doing my best to be objective. I also have to confess that I haven’t got time to really play with it, and I just passed through the documentation, which by the way is well written and clean.
Talking about the rationale behind it (sounds like RoR success story [smile/]):
The main driver behind Stripes is that web application development in Java is just too much work! […] Others, like WebWork 2 and Spring-MVC are much better, but still require a lot of configuration, and seem to require you to learn a whole new language just to get started.
The framework looks like needing almost no configuration (Zero external configuration per page/action (ActionBeans are auto-discovered, and configured using annotations)), tries to eliminate the need to duplicate domain object over the web layer and makes heavy usage of Java5 annotations (f.e. even for URL binding: UrlBinding).
[…] But that doesn’t mean that it can’t run on a Java 1.4 JVM.
and you can read a 2 page HowTo for using Stripes with 1.4 JVMs. There are many other interesting, and I would say important aspects needed for building a normal web app, but I am not gonna describe it here (because I haven’t gained the knowledge to do it and I may present wrong ideas). Here it is a short list of things that I found interesting:
- Use Defaults More
- Spring with Stripes
- Indexed properties
- Intercept Execution
- Localization (in fact I18N support)
- Layout Reuse
Quick updated: after reading the documentation on site, I have downloaded Stripes and hope to find the time to play with it a little.
mindstorms 