EasyWeb4J 0.5 Released

We're proud to announce the release of EasyWeb4J 0.5. This release includes several important changes to further simplify development of web applications using EasyWeb4J.

1. Components of the request URL after the action name are passed to the action method as parameters. These are also converted to the appropriate basic type of the parameters. getIntegerId(), getLongId(), getStringId(), etc. need not be used any more. See the "Parameters in Action Methods" section of this tutorial page.
2. You can define and use application-specific custom annotations on action methods. These annotations can be obtained within your controller using the getActionAnnotation() and getActionAnnotations() methods. This can be very handy to do things like action specific authorization and for setting up action specific request attributes like title, stylesheet, etc.
3. A ResponseHandler interface is provided which can be used to generate raw responses cleanly within the view rendering transaction. See the "Generating Raw Response" section of this tutorial page. Closures should hopefully allow a lot cleaner syntax for this when Java 7 is out.
4. Attributes of your application's ServletContext can be injected into your controllers' fields using @ContextAttribute annotation.
5. Model class provides validateRequired() methods which can be used to validate presence of value in fields.
6. Starting from this release EasyWeb4J will be available from its own maven repository and hence need not be installed to maven manually.
7. The hbm2ddl.auto hibernate property is set to update when a new project is created to simplify initial development. You might want to disable this before taking your application to production.

Contributing to EasyWeb4J also got simpler as the source repository has been moved to GitHub. :)

If that caught your attention, get yourself started with the tutorial and hit the mailing list for any further assistance.