I’ve been impressed by the simplicity of the framework. It has been a while since the last time I’ve played with any Java Web Framework ( I think it was around 6 years ago the last time, using the super hated Struts 1.0! )

So the first good news is the Java world is alive and some good people are writing great frameworks ( with also the big help of all the knowledge/experience gained using other languages) 

I’ve a very personal opinion on this: many people moved to Ruby and have such a bad remembering of the old times in Java, well I think that frameworks like Waffle keeps the name of Java high. 

In addition to that Waffle has a nicer design compared to Rails, no command line scripting ( you might like it, I don’t ), it’s not annotation heavy and you don’t have to write a line of xml ( ok, just one but in the web.xml! )

The only bad thing of Waffle is that there’s not that much documentation on the web ( I’ve to say that it’s so simple to use that you don’t need it! ) so my goal for the next months will be blog as much as possible about it and prepare some speeches too.

When I find something good I definitely want to spread it, and this is the case.

 

Waffle is different from the multitude of web frameworks that exist today, in that Waffle:

• has no mandatory XML configuration files (beyond a minimalist web.xml required by any J2EE-compliant webapp)
• is interoperable with best-of-breed UI templating technologies
• does not have a base controller class to extend or interface to implement
• has controller classes that can support multiple actions, each a single method rather than a sequence of initialiation/settter/execute methods
• has a small learning curve