Show HN: Civilian – a full-stack RESTful Java web framework | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Civilian – a full-stack RESTful Java web framework

civilian-framework.org

29 pointsjdlib7 comments

I thought we had all finally settled on JAX-RS, which (along with recent Servlet versions) means that writing RESTful web services in Java is almost as easy and lack-of-boilerplatey as Ruby/Python/anything else you can think of. There's still a question of wrapping it up nicely, but Dropwizard and even Spring will do a nice job of that, these days (and I'm sure there are others). I just can't see myself writing to a totally different (non-standard) set of APIs when we finally have a standard that works really well.

Couldn't agree more with this. IMO Dropwizard (with help from JAX-RS) has greatly simplified the process of spinning up a basic REST web service: embedded Jetty by default, Jersey support, Logback (talk about simplifying the world of mess known as Java logging), Jackson-based JSON support, etc. Not to mention (despite my many gripes with Maven) being able to simply build this thing as a fat JAR and go.

This new framework, Civilian, on the other hand seems to be going back to over-complicating everything: requires servlet container by default, a shiny new templating language, HTML forms processing, etc.

Hi,

if you are happy with a programming language/framework/library/etc and you get your things done, there is clearly no obligation to look at other stuff. If you are not happy, you might look into alternatives...

Why Civilian? Our motivation: it was fun todo and it does work for us.

Your motivation? Happy with JAX/RS, Spring MVC etc? Just stick to what is working for you. If not take a look (but you did that already, so thanks for that).

Perhaps it would be helpful if someone from the Civilian team point out the motivation for building this full-stack framework and its particular value prop in contrast to DropWizard/Spring?

Just a heads up: on mobile (Nexus 4 Chrome to be exact) the hamburger menu on the website doesn't work.

Doesn't work on Chrome 38 on Win7 x64 desktop either with the window squished up.

thanks for pointing this out. The boostrap.js is not included in the page, thought this was not needed, but forgot about the hamburger menu.

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