Trails is a domain driven development framework inspired by Rails and Naked objects. The major addition with this release is a tutorial that walks thru building a simple application that demonstrates most of the features of Trails.

Trails features in 0.5 include:

* Exposes web UI for your object model with no additional code
* Allows type specific pages
* Allows overriding rendering at the property level
* Automatically supports one-to-many and many-to-one relationships
* Automatically adds validation for not-null and numeric properties
* Persistence using Hibernate
* Configured via Spring
* Reususable Tapestry components for developing custom pages

Visit the Trails 0.5 home page

Struts would have been a better choice for wider acceptance and usage

Because Struts is too limited. Tapestry has a component object model, meaning you can write reusable code. Tapestry was designed for implementing applications, but also as a base for creating more powerful framework layers. Trails is taking advantage of this.

Truth be told, Trails at this point is most just a bunch of components, at this point Tapestry components. Though porting to other web MVC frameworks is desirable, Struts probably won't be at the top of my list. No argument that Struts is more popular, but I would say productivity trumps popularity. Please don't let the use of Tapestry deter you from at least investigating Trails.