Google Sitebricks

I just need to take a few minutes to talk about this. I have really started to love Google Guice the lightweight dependency injection framework. The next question was how to use Guice and some web technologies to build the simplest website with some basic capabilities.

Enter Google sitebricks. I selected sitebricks the other day while working on a report problem in another application. Today I selected it again and included it in the maven pom.xml for a project. After grabbing the dependencies I was a little turned off by how much was brought down. After all I like to think of myself as a minimalist. So off I went to find something even smaller and simpler. I even went back to using plain old JSPs, which would be a good option but I am too lazy to find the TLD's hidden amongst the piles of JSP garbage on the Internet. During this process I even revisited an old friend Wicket. I almost through the switch on using Wicket when I saw how much configuration went into the web.xml to use Guice. Forget that. Something didn't feel right.

So I went back to my last project where I used sitebricks and started looking for what was really required. The first thing was to toss maven out and use Gradle. I set the new project up with the same build.gradle used in my last project with a few less configurations and I was ready to see how small I could make things.

The good news is that I didn't need all those jars brought down initially by Maven.

Summary

google-sitebricks 200kb

google-guice2 650kb

google-guice-servlet 28kb

mvel 680kb

For around 1.5MB (Floppy size) I can start developing and can't wait to show how simple it really is to develop a Java backed page.

To see now go to sitebricks.