The driving goal has been achieving characterics of plainness, frugality, performance, maintainability, testability, and ease of use. It has zero dependencies other than Java's SDK, yet provides a web server, routing, authentication, testing, logging, templating, HTML parsing, and a database, in 3800 lines of code, compiling to a 150k binary.

It currently supports a web application in production. There are also example projects demonstrating its use, linked in the documentation.

As the framework itself has no dependencies, it is built using GNU Make. The example applications that depend on it, however, use Maven as their build tool. Because Minum is still in beta, it is not yet published to Maven - but there are instructions for a workaround.

The framework and example apps require Java 20.