Harnessing Hibernate

Chapter 14. The Finishing Touch: Stripes with Spring and Hibernate

Over the last several years, Java web frameworks have been popping up all over the place. For a while, Struts was the de facto Java framework for web applications but people are now realizing that there are all sorts of options available. Java Server Faces (JSF) has a reasonable share of the enterprise space, and Spring MVC rides along with the Spring Framework into many installations, but developers who discover Stripes are often drawn to this alternative. Stripes doesn’t quite carry the same name recognition that Spring does at this point, but as you know, marketing success doesn’t always directly correlate with quality. Stripes is one of those projects that does a lot of great things despite its relative anonymity.

If you’ve had much experience with some of the web frameworks out there, you probably noticed a handful of ways to get Java code wired together with URLs and form submissions. Most of these ways require complicated XML and Java code to get anything nontrivial to work. These frameworks are so complicated and difficult to use that many people have turned away from using Java entirely for web applications because of the toll it seemed to take on implementation speed. Those people who turned away from Java frameworks also turned away from the great libraries already written in Java and from a feature-rich language. It’s our feeling that Java has a lot to offer, and Stripes eases the development pains traditionally ...