Civilian – a full-stack RESTful Java web framework

In plain words

Civilian is an open-source Java web framework for building server-side applications that run in servlet containers. It provides a lightweight, complete solution for connecting frontend and backend code without imposing constraints on client design, HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. The framework supports both traditional web applications and single-page applications, leaving backend data implementation choices entirely to developers.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

A small, fast, elegant and complete framework to write web applications. Civilian is a server-side framework to develop web applications. It is written in Java (11+) and runs in any servlet (3.1+) container. It is published as open source and free to use. Civilian does not teach you how to implement your data backend. And it does not restrict your client design in terms of HTML layout, CSS rules, JavaScript code, Ajax conversations and data representation. It just helps to build a bridge between these ends. It supports development of traditional round trip applications but also serves single-page apps based on client-side MVC/MVVM JavaScript frameworks. With all the advances shown in SPA…from civilian-framework.org

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