JCatapult is a new open-source platform for building Java web applications. JCatapult is based on a number of industry standards, including JEE and JPA, de-facto standards such as Ant and Hibernate and emerging standards including Guice and Joda-Time. This white paper will discuss the main principles of JCatapult and illustrate how JCatapult can simplify development of large and small applications.

JCatapult was designed from the ground up to address many of the deficiencies in other open source Java platforms. As the platform was built, various open source technologies were selected based on how closely they followed the main principles of JCatapult. These principles are:

• Minimize configuration whenever possible
• Provide intelligent defaults and methods to override them
• Support maximum reuse
• Allow developers to use what they want
• Be as service oriented as possible