Learning Ratpack

Chapter 1. Welcome to Ratpack

At its core, Ratpack is a high-performance framework that marries efficient processing with ease of use. In the modern state of web application development, developer productivity has a necessary emphasis in many web frameworks. Where Ratpack differentiates itself in this space is by continuing to focus on developer productivity, while also providing a foundation upon which performance and resource utilization are forefront considerations. Furthermore, the framework’s concise and easy-to-use application programming interface (API) allows applications to be designed in a way where they can be semantically reasoned about without disjointed concepts or complexities that plague other Java-based web frameworks. Even for a novice developer, Ratpack applications can be quickly built and understood without a high barrier of spool up time. In every respect, Ratpack aims to make it easy to build web applications on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that foster an environment of productivity, performance, and efficiency.

Ratpack takes a lightly opinionated approach to the manner in which applications are built—in other words, as much that can be facilitated in a “one-liner” as possible is presented as such, and when the complexity of a project’s implementation outgrows those facilities, the framework gets out of the way quickly. Ratpack’s infrastructure is designed to be extended, and follows sensible patterns for doing so. As your web application’s requirements ...