Practical Experience using Stripes?

Question

I am coming from an Enterprise Java background which involves a fairly heavyweight software stack, and have recently discovered the Stripes framework; my initial impression is that this seems to do a good job of minimising the unpleasant parts of building a web application in Java.

Has anyone used Stripes for a project that has gone live? And can you share your experiences from the project? Also, did you consider any other technologies and (if so) why did you chose Stripes?

Mccrory

Answer 1

We've been using Stripes for about 4 years now. Our stack is Stripes/EJB3/JPA.

Many use Stripes plus Stripernate as a single, full stack solution. We don't because we want our business logic within the EJB tier, so we simply rely on JPA Entities as combined Model and DTO.

Stripes does the binding to our Entities/DTO and we shove them back in to the EJB tier for work. For most of our CRUD stuff this is very thing and straightforward, making our 80% use case trivial to work with. Yet we have the flexibility to do whatever we want for the edge cases that always come up with complicate applications.

We have a very large base Action Bean which encapsulates the bulk of our CRUD operations that makes call backs in to the individual subclasses specific to the entities and forms.

We also have a large internal tag file library to manage our pages, security, navigation, tasks, etc. A simple CRUD edit form is little more than a list of field names, and we get all of the chrome and menus and access controls "for free".

The beauty of this is that we get to keep the HTTP request based metaphor that we like and we get to choose the individual parts of the system rather than use one fat stack. The Stripes layer is lean and mean, and never gets in our way.

We have a bunch of Ajax integrating YUI and JQuery, all working against our Stripes and EJB stack painlessly.

I also ported a lighter version of the stack to GAE for a sample project, basically having to do minor work to our EJB tier. So, the entire stack is very nimble and amicable to change. Stripes is a big factor of that since we let it do the few things that it does, and does very well. Then delegate the rest to other parts of the stack.

As always there are parts folks would rather have different at times, but Stripes would be the last part to go in our stack, frankly. It could be better at supporting the full HTTP verb set, but I'd rather fix Stripes to do that better than switch over to something else.

Galvan

Updated to have this as preferred answer, since it's more up to date than the others. – Mccrory

Answer 2

We use stripes now on all our production sites, and have been for about a year now. It is an awesome product compared to struts, which we used to use before that. Just the fact that there are literally no XML config files and that you can set it all up with a minimal amount of classes and annotations is awesome.

In terms of scaling & speed it actually seems to be better than struts, and my guess would be because there are less layers involved. The code you end up with is a lot cleaner as well, because you don't have to go off to seperate XML files to find out where redirects are going.

We use it with an EJB3 backend, and the two seem to work really well together, because you can use your EJB POJO inside your actionBean object, without needing a form object like in struts.

In our evaluation we considered an alpha version of struts (that supported annotations) and a lot of other frameworks, but stripes won because of it's superior documentation, stability and clean-ness.

Couldn't figure out how to leave a comment: so to answer your second question we haven't encountered a single bug in Stripes that I know of. This is quite impressive for an open source framework. I haven't tried the latest version (1.5) yet, but 1.4.x is very stable.

Uniat

Thanks for your answer. How reliable has the core codebase been (i.e. have you encountered any defects)? – Mccrory

Now that this answer is nearly 2 years old, I'd be VERY interested in an update on how your stripes projects are. – Nga

rustyshelf, @Nga How about another 6 years later? – Utter

Answer 3

We converted a home-grown web framework to stripes in about a week. We're using it in production at this time and it's a great framework. The community is extremely helpful, and the framework doesn't get in your way. It can be extended in many places to change the behavior as you see fit. The url binding feature is awesome as well. We implemented a robust security framework using annotations and interceptors. We're using spring for dependency injection and stripes has excellent support for that.

I'd definitely use the new 1.5 release if you're going to use it.

I'm a huge fan of the framework. I came from a struts background and it's the exact framework I was looking for. The other developers on our team really enjoy using the stripes framework.

I just bought the stripes beta book from the pragmatic programmer's site. It's a great resource on Stripes 1.5.

Syringa

How big of an application did you move? Was it mostly your typical CRUD or did you have complex Javascript? – Butyrin

Our application presents data from a lot of different back in systems. It brings that data into one place. Our CRUD type stuff was mostly in the admin part of the site. We're using the yui javascript framework for layout and ajax stuff. It's a pretty large application though about 38,000 LOC. – Syringa

Thanks for your answer. Very encouraging ... I've spent some time learning PHP on top of my existing J2EE skills but Stripes might lure me back. – Mccrory

Answer 4

We have now used Stripes in multiple production projects and so far the experience has been great. Setup time is low and the configuration management issues seem to be fewer. We have webapps running with Stripes/Dojo/Hibernate and others with a mix of Stripes/Spring/JSP/Jquery etc. Adding Stripes to our existing projects was fairly simple thanks to their support for integrating existing Spring configurations. Using Stripes with JSP is fun although sometimes you do feel the need to code in Java and not have to use the JSTL so much.

Note: This is an old question, but given that it pops up pretty fast when you search for Stripes usage, I am adding a response to it.

Shellyshelman

Answer 5

I also came from a Struts and JSF background into Stripes. I went from a large enterprise environment that used mostly struts and JSF on newer projects, to a smaller environment that did all their J2EE in Stripes.

Seems like Stripes gives you what you want in a Web Framework without getting in the way too much. Not much configuration is necessary, as others have already mentioned. Very quick development and allows you to focus on presentation etc. instead of hassling with the framework.

If I had to start a fresh new project and I had my say, I would choose either Stripes or JSF. I might have been scared away from Stripes if I had to make the decision to switch to it, because it kind of looks/feels like a sourceforge basement project instead of a enterprise-grade framework, but it seems to be fairly solid. We use Stripernate for easy ORM.

However, it reminds me of Fruit Stripe gum, which lost its flavor WAY TOO FAST.

Canaster

Answer 6

Stripes is yesterdays technology, if you can pick something a little more modern like GWT.

Jimerson

This is like saying HTML is yesterdays technology and you should only be using Javascript as it's modern. Because Stripes is an action based framework for generating HTML pages and GWT is a Java to Javascript compiler for building RIA applications (good for making sure Google never finds you're website!) – Volitant

Well the poster did not mention SEO was a concern so a pure JS application or some mixture does not appear to be a problem. Most business apps that do crud and the like do not need to be searchable. – Jimerson

@Volitant We are not discussing HTML. Stripes and HTML are very different beasts, you dont have to pick Stripes to do HTML, in fact shock horror you can pick many other techs. Im just saying pick modern and better dont accept old and boring. We have computers today only a fool would use a chisel and stone. – Jimerson