Raúl Ochoa

I’m working in my final degree project, an interactive web document commenting system that allows people to annotate comments directly onto document elements like words at paragraphs and images.

My mentor forced me to use Java as the primary language for the project. In these days choosing a J2EE Framework sucks. If you’re a fashion-victim/fancy-boy, you know, you’ll end using a combination of Struts + Spring + Hibernate + AnyFlavourOfYourFavoriteJavaTrendyWebTechnology and obviously a gazillion of XML config files. Do you really need all of this stuff for little projects with just two SQL queries and three templates? It was driving me crazy for about two weeks. I’m not underestimating Structs or Hibernate or whatever, I’m saying it doesn’t fit for small projects.

You must be thinking I’m using a single approach with some Servlets and JSP files, and also you can be wrong. I don’t like how huge struts framework is, but I’m a fan of trendy-best-practices ;-). I love the way Google’s App Engine, Ruby on Rails and Django enforce you to get things done. I’ve been hacking with the Java Reflection API, Tomcat and other stuff for a while, now I can tell you I have a little alpha-baby called Bazooka.

Bazooka is a high-level convention-over-configuration J2EE Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. (Is it possible in Java World?)

Currently Bazooka is under development, in its 0.2614972128 version (aka Meissel-Mertens [1]) it features:

• MVC paradigm
• RESTful
• Ehcache support
• ActiveObjects ORM (à la ActiveRecord). It supports Derby, HSQLDB, SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL.
• Pure Java HTML Forms (with validation…)
• Templates with layouts (allowing you to include a view into a general layout)
• Authentication and user-role helpers
• JUnit and log4j integration
• A simple app admin console to manage database migrations and cache status.
• NO XML configuration files!

For now I’m the solo user-developer, but I plan to release it under a free software license. When? I don’t know, but keep checking this blog. In the next blog-post I’ll show you how easy is to develop a simple web application with my little Bazooka baby }:-).

[1] One day I’ll explain how I assign version numbers.