Introduction - Stripes...and Java Web Development is Fun Again - page 3

Another nice thing about Stripes is that you need to learn only a few
basic concepts to get started. You can go a long way with a small set of
features and can leave the advanced stuff for later. When your applica-
tions become more sophisticated, you can learn how to get more out of
Stripes. This cuts down on complexity when you start using the frame-
work, because you don't need to learn too many things at once before
you get some gratification.

What truly makes Stripes a joy to work with is that it helps you with-
out getting in your way. You can actually wrap your head around the
framework and understand what it is doing. When you run into a situ-
ation where you need something special, you can tap in and tinker to
get the required result. Stripes is not a big magic black box that works
“only if used as intended” and for which the warranty is void if you tear
off the sticker and open the box.

1.1 What Can Stripes Do for You?

So if Stripes is so small and simple, what does it actually do? Plenty.
Here's a quick feature summary:

• Smart binding: Stripes goes a long way to bind URLs, parameters,
and events from HTTP to Java so that your code remains sim-
ple and straightforward. The names in your view templates match
the names of your Java classes, methods, and properties, so the
association between the two is very clear.
• Autoloading: Stripes automatically discovers and loads your
Stripes-related classes, so you can add, rename, and remove clas-
ses without worrying about keeping any configuration files (XML
or otherwise) in sync.
• Validation: Stripes provides a powerful validation mechanism that
is based on annotations.
• Type conversion and formatting: Stripes gives you strong type sup-
port by automatically converting between String s and common Java
types and making it easy to add your own data types to its con-
version system.
• Layouts: With three tags from its tag library, Stripes gives you
a simple and powerful reusable layout mechanism. You guessed
it—no configuration files involved here either.
• Localization: Stripes tags have a default resource bundle lookup
strategy so that localization is simply a matter of following the