Stripes

Stripes is a presentation framework for building web applications using the latest Java technologies. The main driver behind Stripes is that web application development in Java is just too much work!

It seems like every existing framework requires gobs of configuration. Stripes was initially conceived and developed as a lightweight framework, taking advantage of the latest technologies to remove the drudgery from Java web development. Stripes easy for developers to pick up, to learn and to use on a daily basis. In this sense, simplicity means intuitiveness and productivity.

Stripes is simple in that it doesn't force developers to grok everything about it in order to get started. By not having to know all the details, or even that many of them exist, it's easy for a developer to get the basics and get started. Stripes, at its core, is an action framework and action frameworks as a whole don't shy away from the fact that the entire web is implemented on top of a stateless protocol (HTTP).

There are myriad shortcomings in HTTP, and in the various dialects of HTML that are in use. Trying to hide the fact that HTTP is stateless and provide a framework that hides this fact from the developer is fraught with issues, and nearly always leads to a leaky abstraction. Component frameworks tend to lead to more complicated programming environments, while simultaneously not dealing completely with state issues.

Stripes works more like Excel - it uses a bunch of DateFormats and pre-processing to parse literally hundreds of different formats without the developer ever specifying a mask.