HAPPY TRAILS

It must have been sometime early in the summer of 2005 when Jim Weirich showed his friend Chris Nelson the Ruby on Rails [1] video at a meeting of the Cincinnati Java User Group. Chris was impressed by the simple and quick approach to developing web applications and decided to introduce the same approach to his favorite programing language, Java. A few months later, Chris came up with the goods, introducing the first version of Trails [2], an elegant web framework for Java. The purpose of the Trails project is to “…make Java enterprise development radically simpler by allowing developers to focus on the domain model” while other portions of the code are dynamically generated [1]. Trails minimizes the quantity of original coding and automatically generates as much of the code as possible. The name Trails is derived from Rails and adds a T for Tapestry [3]. Tapestry is an open source framework for building web applications in Java. Trails also relies on concepts and components from other trusted frameworks, such as Apache Ant, AspectJ [4], Spring [5], and the object relational mapper Hibernate.