Frame2

This post was originally part of a series documenting an open source web framework I worked on. The framework is well and dead, but I’m keeping these posts for posterity.

I made an earlier post touting TurboM2, but things have happened in the last few months that have resulted in its disappearance. Luckily, I grabbed a full source snapshot before the site went offline. Shortly thereafter, I got myself a SourceForge account, and the Frame2 Web Application Framework was born.

The newly revamped application looks and operates nearly the same for web application developers. Under the covers, however, is an entirely different story.

The source structure has been completely revamped to eliminate strange redundancies, such as nested test directories.

Many bugs have been fixed. I’m still surprised that we shipped TurboM2 in the state we did. For example, the custom tag library produced illegal HTML when trying to specify CSS information.

Requirements that were supposedly met in TurboM2 are now implemented. The biggest transgressor in this case was the requirement to make the use of Commons Validator optional. The framework had hardcoded dependencies on the Commons Validator library, however, so omitting it from a web application would result in the framework crashing.

Anyway — it’s been a couple of months of work, but Frame2 version 1.0 is very much alive and ready to be used.

What is Frame2? Frame2 is a Web Application framework. In its original incarnation as TurboM2, it was developed to compete directly with Struts, and as such shares many of the same features. Frame2 is (in my opinion) simpler to use than Struts. For example, if you want to use the Commons Validator in Struts, you need to make sure that you are using the right flavor of Form. By contrast, all Events in Frame2 have Commons Validator functionality built-in. All that needs to be done is to enable the correct plugin in the configuration file.