Digital Earth Weblog

It has been quiet here in the Digital Earth Dungeon. I’ve been doing a lot of software development work. Apart from prototyping a Delphi desktop application, and gearing up for a VB.Net application, I’ve been working on a Java web application that uses the excellent Stripes framework and Hibernate object/relational mapper.

After a bad experience with JavaServer Faces (JSF) it was decided that JSF would be removed from this application, and that another web framework should not be introduced. A custom presentation layer was written using home grown controllers and JSP views. This worked reasonably well, but a lot of time was spent writing code to do mundane repetitive things. Copying parameter values from the HTTP request to backing beans, the associated conversions to non-String data types, and common validation routines come to mind.

Application developers should be focused on providing business value, not the plumbing. This sort of stuff should just work, or be dead simple to implement. As the application got larger more and more duplicate code appeared, and a lot of it was doing mundane stuff. The duplication should have been abstracted out, but the time was not available to write yet another web framework. Others have done a better job of that already.

So, it was off to the Web, yet again, looking for a suitable Java web framework. There are many to choose from, and there were two core criteria:

1. Not having a learning curve that resembled Mt Everest. Immediate productivity was required.
2. It had to be a request-based framework.

Component/event-based frameworks like JSF do their best to abstract away the Web. This additional complexity was not wanted. A framework that worked with the web was the way to go.

After some late nights surfing the web, reading framework documentation, and sifting through the opinions and biases of many commenters on websites and blogs we had a winner: WebWork. What! Isn’t this about Stripes? Patience Grasshopper.

WebWork’s learning curve looked steeper than desired, but there were many positives. There were books available, indicating maturity and a solid community. The product seemed to have a good future, being slated as the basis for the next generation of Struts. Some well know web applications use WebWork. Etc.

At the last minute a post to a website was noticed, written by a guy named Tim Fennell, which mentioned a framework called Stripes. “Stripes? Haven’t heard of that one. Oh well, one more can’t hurt.”

The homepage of the Stripes website struck a chord. “The main driver behind Stripes is that web application development in Java is just too much work!” Exactly! Some more reading revealed that Stripes was definitely worth a decent look. Version 1.2.2 was downloaded. It was small, with minimal dependencies. A nice change. Exploration of the sample application began, along with some more reading of the well written online docs.

To cut a long story short (oops, too late, sorry) Stripes was implemented. It lived up to high expectations. The application developer (ahem) took a short while to get their head around some key concepts, and to work out how to best use Stripes with Hibernate, but after that it was plain sailing.

Stripes took care of all the mundane tasks and let the developer focus on business logic. It also gives the developer a bit of flexibility. It doesn’t force them to follow “the one and only true way”. In short, it was a pleasure to use. It also substantially reduced the amount of code in the presentation layer of this web application, and made it more maintainable.

While all this was going on Tim Fennell, and a growing developer community, were working on Stripes 1.3. It has just been released, so if you’re on the lookout for a Java web framework do yourself a favour and have a look at Stripes.

Very nice work, Tim!

[tags]java, stripes, web frameworks, hibernate[/tags]