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One of the biggest (maybe the biggest?) contributions to language and framework adoption is marketing in the form of blog posts, training sessions and quality tutorials. This is why RoR is so popular even when it isn't all that great (there are many technically superior alternatives across many languages) - it has amazingly good marketing for a framework.

So to answers your question: you don't hear about Stripes because Stripes is bad at marketing. Just look at their website - it looks like its from the 90s. A small bit of CSS work is probably the best thing Stripes could do to increase user base.

I dabbled in Stripes a while back(moved job, now on Spring3), and I liked it as well. Lightweight and easy to use but lacked decent support and user traction. No reason it's not used more, and I don't know why either.

Play is a great framework, a breath of fresh air for Java community!