Bear wrote a small framework called Front Man which I had previously ignored, but recently I had to write a small web app from scratch and was looking for a small MVC implementation.

Now I try avoid blogs that have nothing nice to say and just want to rant about everything under the Sun, but I have never been a fan of Struts and I am certainly not going to consider it for a personal project that will probably consist of a half dozen actions. I'll spend my time saying something nice about Front Man instead.

I was pleased by Front Man and it was just what I was looking for. Small, functional, useful and free of bloat. I doubt I'd look at it for a large project, but for my simple needs it was an exact fit.

I'll include the features here since I had to go looking for them in the docs: (it can be found in the javadoc for the org.bibeault.frontman package)

• The API and usage is learnable within an hour.
• Can be set up in minutes.
• Self-contained; does not require any other 3rd-party jar files in order to operate.
• Small set of easily-understandable classed and interfaces.
• Servlet controllers and page views are referenced via abstracted naming (no Invoker-like class names in URLs, and no hard-coded file paths for JSP files).
• Minimal configuration within web.xml, and within two properties files.
• Minimal processing overhead per request.
• No hiding or getting in the way of how the servlet API works.
• Generally usable, but designed to cotton to Model 2 applications using scriptless JSP pages.
• No required on-page impact: no required declarations, directives or tags.
• No unnecessary bells and whistles; mererly a small set of generally useful, but completely optional, extras.