Since there is an explosion of non-J2EE web tier techonologies (Struts , Tapesty , Spring Webflow and Spring MVC , WebWork , etc) it was logical to provide an alternative way of invoking such frameworks while avoiding the use of "fat" J2EE compliant web containers (Tomcat , Jetty , etc).
This idea was the inspiration for Danube. Aiming to provide a simple, configurable and extensible POJO based HTTP server, while avoiding the superfluous functionality of modern, currently popular web containers. It has been developed to be fully HTTP/1.1 compliant.
As a pure Java open source project it is an ideally positioned platform for further research of web tier functionality within enterprise scale internet applications.
