A development framework that brings a fresh approach to Portlet development.

Portlet development looks like jumping back in time a good 15 years: the standards (no matter whether you pick JSR-168 or JSR-286) are oldish and closely resemble servlets, there is very little MVC in it, and there's a lot to know about portlets lifecycle and how to safely pass state around between the business code an the presentation code.

There are quite a few "portlet bridges" that enable Struts2, JSF and Apache Wicket development on a JSR-286 compliant container, but using a bridge means stacking one complex technology on top of another, with the net effect of having a very heavyweight request lifecycle and losing fine-grained control over what's going on because of the many mismatching abstraction layers you're running on.

I knew Struts2 as an elegant and lightweight framework: IMHO its programming model strikes a sweet spot between abstraction and control, but STruts is for the Servlet world. I wanted something similar for my Portlets. That's where the name comes from: STRUTs and porTLETS makes STRUTLETS.

I have spent much time trying to cull the best ideas in Java development (from Struts2, Spring, Hibernate and many many other libraries I've been using over time) and to merge them together. Others have done a good job before me, so I've tried to reuse anything that would fit nicely with my design.

To get an in-depth explanation of how the framework can serve your needs and how it works internally, you can start from the WIKI's main page.