Hi, I built the first version of Soklet back in 2015 as a way to move away from what I saw as the complexity and "magic" of Spring (it had become the J2EE creature it sought to replace). I have been refining it over the years and have just released version 2.0.0, which embraces modern Java development practices.

Check it out here: https://www.soklet.com

I was looking for something that captured the spirit of projects like Express (Node), Flask (Python), and Sinatra (Ruby) but had the power of a "real" framework and nothing else quite fit: Spark/Javalin are too bare-bones, Quarkus/Micronaut/Helidon/Spring Boot/etc. have lots of dependencies, moving parts, and/or programming styles I don't particularly like (e.g. reactive).

What I wanted to do was make building a web system almost as easy as a "hello world" app without compromising functionality and I feel I have accomplished this goal.

Other goals - support for Server-Sent Events, which are table-stakes now in 2026 and "native" integration testing (just run instances of your app in a Simulator) are best-in-class in my opinion. Servlet integration is also available if you can't yet fully disentangle yourself from that world.

If you're interested in Soklet, you might like some of its zero-dependency sister projects:

Pyranid, a modern JDBC interface that embraces SQL: https://www.pyranid.com Lokalized, which enables natural-sounding translations (i18n) via an expression language: https://www.lokalized.com

I think Java is going to become a bigger player in the LLM space (virtual threads now, forthcoming Vector API/Project Panama/etc.) If you're building agentic systems (or just need a simple REST API), Soklet may be a good fit for you.

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