Why?

Spark's intention is not to compete with Sinatra, or the dozen of clones in different languages (Grafitti, Nancy, Flask, Sammy etc...). Its intention is to be used by Java developers that want or are required to develop in pure Java.

Spark focuses on being as simple and straight-forward as possible, without the need for cumbersome (XML) configuration, to enable very fast web application development in pure Java with minimal effort. (It’s a totally different paradigm when compared to the overuse of annotations for accomplishing pretty trivial stuff seen in JAX-RS).