The JCatapult team is pleased to announce the release of JCatapult 1.0 RC2. For those unfamiliar with JCatapult, here is an overview:

JCatapult is an open source (ASLv2) application development platform targeted primarily at web applications, but capable of being used for most applications. JCatapult is built on top of well known open source tools including:

• Apache Ant
• Struts2
• Hibernate
• Guice
• FreeMarker
• Joda
• Many others

As a web application platform, JCatapult provides a truly lightweight method of writing and using services. By leveraging Guice for dependency injection you don't have to mess around with tons of XML files to wire your application together. In fact, JCatapult is based on the principle of discovering services. This means you write the services and JCatapult will find them.

One of the best features of JCatapult is its support for Modules. JCatapult Modules are full sets of functionality that can be plugged into any JCatapult web application. An example of a Module might be a fully functional Blog. Once added, JCatapult will discover the Module and your web application will inherit all its functionality. In other words, users will be able to add, edit and manage blogs without you having to write a single line of code. A number of commercial JCatapult Modules are already being written and more are in the works. The JCatapult team hopes to see a number of open source Modules start to appear in the near future.

JCatapult has a number of other services and tools it provides including:

• Scaffolding framework
• Deployment framework
• Database migrations
• Pluggable build system
• Dependency management (via Savant)
• Credit card services
• Email services
• And others

JCatapult is already in use in a number of websites and is stable for real-world use.

What do you think of JCatapult's module discovery and dependency injection features?