Echo2 Integration

I have a crush on Echo2. It was love at first sight when I saw its demo at the NextApp website. Since then, I have gradually integrated it into my pet project and experienced a major development boost. I replaced all the Spring MVC related coding (which is actually nothing more than an upgraded version of Struts 1.0) with Echo2 components and it works great.

With Echo2 you can develop event-driven Swing-like applications, without having to bother about typical HTTP-requests and responses. Plus, with Echo2, the only lines you need to write are in Java. There is no XML configuration, and you never have to write a single line of HTML or Javascript. Modelling it to look very slick is easy and given its built-in AJAX capabilities, it delivers Web 2.0 quality right out of the box. And, most importantly, it's just fun to develop web interfaces using java objects !

Let's hope this project does not get abandoned. Its latest version has been released 6 months ago. It would be a real pity, since NextApp's Echo2 framework seems the only framework that allows you to avoid JSP's and taglibs when developing webapplications. When developing webapplications, you can choose from about a dozen jsp-centered frameworks (Struts, JSF, Spring MVC, ...) but Echo2 really stands out of this crowd. In the Java world, where new open source frameworks are reinventing the weel constantly, this appears strange to me.