What the Heck is Barracuda?
barracuda.gif (11357 bytes) This document is meant to give you the fastest possible introduction to Barracuda, so you can decide whether or not you should bother learning more.

Barracuda is an open-source Presentation Framework designed to make it easier to build servlet based webapps by applying proven client-server patterns to the web development paradigm.

Key features include:

  • DOM based templating mechanism for better separation of code from content (default implementation uses XMLC...see http://xmlc.enhydra.org)

  • UI component model that provides a series of server side widgets (table, list, template, etc) that make it easy to manipulate DOM structures. Strongly typed MVC interfaces just like in Swing. Support for multiple markup languages (HTML, WML, XML, etc).

  • Event model that provides Model 2 style flow control and allows for true event driven programming on the server. You can add listeners to components and your server-side event handler code will automatically get notified when an action occurs on the client.

  • Form mapping and validation framework that makes it possible to easily convert HTTP Request form parameters into first class Java objects and validate them

  • Localization services that extend the XMLC compiler to make it really easy to localize DOM templates and then load them based on target locale

  • based on the Servlet 2.2+ API (so it'll run in any decent app-server).

  • And of course it's available as open source under the Enhydra Public License (EPL)! ;-)

For more details, check out the website--source is available under CVS, there's a rapidly growing user base, a mailing list to ask questions, lots of documentation, sample apps, yadda, yadda, yadda.

For all the latest information on Barracuda, please refer to http://barracuda.enhydra.org
Questions, comments, feedback? Let us know...