Hoople

Hoople is a revolutionary software that allows programmers to implement attribute-oriented programming in URLs. This means that instead of having the configuration information for each URL scattered across a website, users can create a single XML configuration file that contains all the required "logic" for each URL on the filesystem. These XML files are stored in the same location as the file for the URL. For example, if a website has a URL of "/news/index.html," the XML configuration file would be stored at $DOCUMENT_ROOT/news/index.html.

Unlike other web frameworks like Struts, JSF, Spring, etc., Hoople's servlet catches all *.html requests, and the XML configuration file is not required at all. Developers can access these files in various ways depending on how the configuration is needed.

While developing, possible URLs are easy to locate as there is a file for each URL present in the file system. This is in contrast to specifying URLs in various XML configuration files.

Furthermore, "welcome-file-list" actually works for welcome URLs managed by Struts/Spring/JSF because application servers see that a file is present and will not automatically return a 404 error before verifying the existence of a servlet-mapping that matches the URL.

Hoople is licensed and distributed under the Apache License Version 2.0, and its features can be accessed by using an Ant task to generate the required configuration file, parsing through all the configuration files at runtime with a servlet or scheduled job, or applying security, logging, and transactions to the URL with a Servlet Filter. Developers can also read the configuration files to learn about what URLs are supposed to do and what they're not supposed to do.