About Loom

What is Loom?

Loom is an open source Java web framework that handles user input validation and HTML generation for enterprise applications of any size. There are some important features that differentiate Loom from other frameworks:

• Validation of user input is performed using annotations, with the possibility to reuse existing JPA annotations.
• It's based on a strong separation of concerns via CSS and unobtrusive JavaScript.
• We take accessibility very seriously.
• Originally developed to deliver real software. As a result common practices such as database persistence, progressive enhancement and highly-responsive UIs have been included in a way as transparent as possible.
• Internationalization is deeply rooted in the framework architecture.
• A complete tag library to help with the everyday issues of any REST application.
• A separate javascript library that can be entirely replaced at any time.

Features

• A scaffolding tool that helps you get your project up and running in minutes.
• Simplified spring config using our custom XML namespace.
• Spring annotation support, which means that you can just @Autowire components into your Action beans.
• Web resource bundles: concatenate, gzip and minify your javascript and web resources on-the-fly.
• Transparent pagination: get your paged listings with the minimal hassle.
• Automatic validation of JPA persistent attributes (in case you are using JPA, that is).
• Support of JAX-RS annotations: @Path, @GET, @POST, @DELETE and @PUT
• Outstanding cache support to help managing the browser cache from the server.
• Support for security annotations (JSR250 and spring-security): if used, links pointing to forbidden resources can be automatically disabled in the generated HTML markup.

Some architecture details can be checked out here and here.

Why another web framework?

Software should be easy to develop. We have found that current enterprise application development has a big unexploited potential:

• Developing for the business and database layers is a breeze with modern Java frameworks.
• Annotations provide a way of declaring constraints in a way that does not collide with normal Java syntax.
• Recent improvements in JavaScript and Ajax interfaces have opened whole new ways of developing applications.
• Convention over Configuration practices can also be applied to Java applications.
• The web layer should not promote redundance of business rules.
• Accessibility should be enforced by the underlying framework instead of the application developer.

These considerations motivated the kick start of The Loom Framework.

Who are we

Extrema Sistemas is a consulting company in Spain. Since 2002 we have been developing Java enterprise applications and helping others to do so, reinventing ourselves on every step to achieve the very best product possible.