Joist

Overview

Joist is a web application development stack. It consists of two sub-projects joist.domain, an ORM with type-safe queries (no strings) and no runtime class generation (no CGLIB), and joist.web, a component-based web framework.

The goal is a simple, productive environment for enterprise-scale webapps.

Sections

• Screencasts
• Getting Started
• joist.domain
• joist.web
• bindgen
• Eclipse Tips
• Code Generation

Opinions

Joist is tailored for projects that agree with its opinions:

• Enterprise teams are best served by a simple language and as much type safety as possible
• Domain objects should match and be driven by the schema
• Most HTML templates are boilerplate spaghetti code with no levels of abstraction
• PostgreSQL is the database (though a h2 branch exists with passing tests)

Caveats

• Annotation processing (e.g. bindgen) works best in Eclipse running in a 1.6 JVM.

  Just using a JDK5 JVM for running Eclipse itself with the JDK6 compiler option set is not enough–for APT to work, Eclipse needs its own JVM to have the JDK6-only annotation processing APIs.

  This is difficult developers on Mac OSX because Eclipse’s SWT binaries are 32-bit but the Apple JDK6 is 64-bit. Mac OSX users will either have to find a 32-bit JDK6 to install or wait until the Eclipse 3.5 ships with 64-bit support. FWIW, the Eclipse 3.5 integration releases work well on win32.

• The type-safe SQL DSL currently only handles a simple subset of SQL queries. It needs flushed out by more real-world usage.

Source

Joist is hosted on github:

http://github.com/stephenh/joist

Community

Joist is a new project and does not yet have an active community. If you’re interested in getting involved or just being kept in the loop, feel free to email stephen@exigencecorp.com.

Acknowledgements

Joist borrows ideas mainly from Rails (migrations, database-reflected-domain objects), Tapestry/Click (component-based pages), and JaQu (type-safe SQL queries).