Ninja is a Java full-stack web development framework that is stable, fast, and very efficient.
Ninja is an integrated software stack. The aim is that you don’t have to setup everything yourself. Ideally you just generate a new project from our maven archetype, import the project into your IDE and start hacking.
Therefore Ninja is made up of libraries that deliver everything. From Html, Json and Xml rendering and parsing to management of different environments, database persistence, testing and much more.
Main features
rock solid
Ninja didn't invent the wheel from scratch - we're standing on the shoulders of giants. Ninja uses the most mature and stable technologies in the industry, including Servlet, Guice, JPA, Flyway Migration and Maven, etc.
Scalable
Ninja adopts a non-shared strategy. The servers do not share any general session information. This means that you can scale Ninja horizontally very easily.
100% Java
You get all the benefits of Java: excellent IDE support, statically typed language, huge and mature ecosystem, best testing support, and more. Ninja is released under the Apache 2.0 open source license - the codebase is always open source.
develop
You can use the Maven archetype to generate a new project, import it into your favorite IDE and start programming. Ninja's SuperDevMode gets all code changes at once. What features does Ninja support? HTML, XML, JSON, JPA, caching, and more.
test
Ninja comes with a wealth of testing tools that can perform mock tests and integration tests on your application on a real server. Want to run selenium tests? Also supported. Ninja can run locally and on any continuous integration server.
DevOps
Package your Ninja application into a war file and run it on your application server (Tomcat, Jetty, etc.). You can also create a standalone application and copy it to your server to run in production. Ninja runs in the cloud and supports the Heroku platform, App Engine and many other cloud service providers.
Key features we wanted to see
After long hours of discussions and a lot of prototypes we came up with the following key features:
1)Web friendly. Restful architecture. Simple programming model.
2)Plain vanilla Java. Dependency Injection. First class IDE integration.
3)Super fast development cycles.
4)Simple and fast to test (Mocked tests / Integration tests).
5)Excellent build and CI support.
6)Simple JSON consumption and rendering for clean RESTful APIs.
7)HTML rendering / Form submission validation and parsing.
8)Built-in support for authentication of users.
9)Not much bytecode magic. Clean codebase - easy to extend.
And because we have many customers that run their applications on the Google App Engine (GAE) we needed to support the GAE, too.