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.