How it all started?

I strongly believe that such things are born at the interface of a deep feeling of inefficiency from working with current tools and the desire to change the situation for the better. I got the idea to create such a product about 10 years ago. I was hired by a big company for a huge project. And it failed. That happened because everything was made too complicated. You know, I was really disappointed. Of course, I was paid for it but I worked 3 years for a software that was never completed.

I thought it should be possible to implement applications without using every technology that is currently hyped and publicized. That project was about e-government and there were some efforts in Switzerland to create standards for this topic. I took these standards and implemented them. Although it was a nice software I had no commercial success with. But I found some ideas I had during development very applicable. I extracted them in a way they could be generally reused. After a while, experience and best practices modern developers can use a new effective framework we named Minimal-J.

What do you get with this framework?

We all want to use the best technology. But the best doesn't always mean high-loaded. I want to highlight some main advantages you should notice:

1. Programming style

You could say Minimal-J is just an open source Java framework like many others. But its programming style has a very different approach to software development. Modern frameworks try to provide every possible solution for all possible problems. This, of course, leads to great flexibility but on the bad side also to the great complexity. But as a developer, I don't want to lose myself in technologies and configurations. And I hope you too. Minimal-J doesn´t want to solve all of the developer problems. It's very focused on specific requirements and proposes what I think are the best solutions for the technical challenges. Minimal-J applications are better fits for nonpublic use like in a company custom software. You won't make a new Facebook with it. But you will create a fast and easy to use application with no surprises for users.

2. Production cost

Small application size still has its advantages. Sometimes developers pay a lot for memory. There are two use cases where it matters:

• In device integrated software like control UI of a router (the hardware may be limited or the storage should not be used for preinstalled software)
• when you deploy software on a cloud (the cost per month depends on how much memory and CPU time you spend)

Minimal-J can easily live with a 128MB configuration. Some cloud providers offer such small virtual machines for free.

3. Security

Minimal-J depends only on one or two external third party libraries. As every library could have it´s security flaws this reduces possible attacks. Also, there is less need to update the framework and applications. Of course, Minimal-J also could have security issues. But as Minimal-J itself is rather small a security review can go deeper. Also because of the small size developers understand the code better and are not lost in a framework that they don't completely understand. From a security perspective, this helps very much.

4. UI

Here the web UI is mainly used but other types are provided too. For the in-house application, it could still make sense to develop desktop applications. They could be more comfortable for the user. The type can be configured at startup. This also means that the business logic is completely separated from the used UI technology. The web UI is very responsive. It works on a desktop browser and scales nicely down on a small mobile display.

5. Fun and easy-going work

And finally. The new programming style makes developing fun again. You don't get lost in configuration files, your IDE and building tools are fast.

I'd appreciate it if you would download and try our framework. Share your resulting projects with the community. Don't hesitate to start a new bright period in your developer live.

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