Introduction - Stripes...and Java Web Development is Fun Again - page 2

tasks; Stripes takes care of those so that you can concentrate instead
on writing clear, concise, readable, and maintainable code.
Let's briefly discuss some of the characteristics of Stripes. Stripes is
a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework and is mostly present in
the controller and view parts. Stripes interacts with your model but
does not intrude—your model stays independent of anything Stripes-
specific. Stripes happily transfers data between your model and the
controller/view without asking you to describe anything in some con-
figuration file or do any other form of “framework hand-holding.”
Stripes is not a “full-stack” framework; it works with your model but lets
you decide how to map your model to a database. Plenty of high-quality
frameworks exist for that, and the Stripes developers do not see value
in duplicating those efforts. Moreover, not only do you probably already
have a favorite solution for model-database mapping, but perhaps you
even use different frameworks depending on the application. Stripes
sees the value in that and does not tie you to a single solution. Stripes is
very lightweight that way—it doesn't reinvent the wheel for everything,
and it won't require that you learn a completely different paradigm.
Stripes just focuses on the web part of web application development.
Stripes developers are very careful to avoid the “scope creep” pitfall.
It's easily understandable that you'd want to add every single feature
requested by users—you want to please them. In the long run, you're
actually doing users a disservice because the number of features ex-
plodes, leading to a bloated, hard-to-understand, and hard-to-maintain
framework. With a never-ending list of classes and methods, too many
tags, and a ton of attributes, a framework becomes tedious to use.
Stripes stays focused on a core set of features. At the same time, Stripes
is very simple to extend so that you can easily add anything you need.
Stripes is an action-based framework. It acknowledges the stateless
nature of HTTP and does its best to get the most out of it. HTTP is
based on a request-response cycle: when the user clicks something
in the browser, a request is made to the web application, which does
its work and provides a response. The browser is refreshed with the
results, and the cycle is complete. Stripes shapes itself to fit into this
request-response cycle. A request is translated into an action, which
triggers a Java method that does the work and returns a result. The
framework interprets the result and provides the appropriate response.
By using plain requests and responses, Stripes stays transparent and
makes it easy to plug in third-party libraries and Ajax frameworks.