What better way to kick off my new weblog than with an entry about Stripes!  I was reading the mailing list this morning and there is a discussion about Stripes versus Struts2.  The author of the thread was trying to convince his team that they should migrate to Stripes instead of Struts2.  So he asked for some leverage from the Stripes community.  I'm not going to get into that debate here but an avid Stripes user, Will, made some very nice remarks regarding why Stripes is so good.  I'd like to pull out some of his comments here.

You can learn pretty much everything you need to know about using Stripes in 1 to 2 hours

This is mostly true.  Stripes is just that simple.  In 1.5 there are a few things that will take a bit longer to perfect but its not rocket science.

And that's another criticism I've heard before. Stripes "moves too slow". We've been at 1.4.3 for some time, and 1.4.2 before that even longer. 1.5 is just around the corner. But, again, simplicity, and extensibility mitigate the need for lots of change. It just works, and keeps working. That keeps it really stable, and makes it a great foundation to build upon. I don't know if you've noticed, but HTTP hasn't changed a lot in the past several years.

This I think is important to understand.  Stripes just works and because of that Stripes doesn't need to release a dozen minor versions during its lifetime to fix bugs and add feature bloat.

Rather than getting some monolithic beast, full of bugs, full of mixed design idioms, full of promises barely kept, you get a shining diamond forged in the fires of day to day use. When you're looking for infrastructure, which is what Stripes is, you don't want a framework that is some mashup of stuff off the web, or worse, reinvented stuff off the web. You want consistency, simplicity and robustness.

Well, said.  Nothing for me to add here.  Then when speaking about the great 1.5 release coming out soon (already in beta)...

Everything else is simplifying the system to make it more powerful. More consistent. More easier to use. We're not getting a boat load of new revolutionary features in 1.5. No boxed set of components with glizy, worthless demos. No full stack from Web 2.0 screens down to the persistence level, forcing their idioms on your projects. No, we get what we've always had, but better. More refined. More efficient. And simpler.

And to sum up...

Stripes is an Action framework. It's proud of it, it's not drifting away to anything else. No delusions of grandeur, no plans on shaking the world with the next great idiom.

Will made some great points on why Stripes is a great framework.  Its easy to get caught up in framework features.  Framework A has this and Framework B and that and Framework C and this and that.  But when it comes down to the essence of what a web application is supposed to do Stripes can't be beat on simplicity and ease of use while being powerful at the same time.

Read Will's full post here.