This article gives an overview over eaLib, a framework for the implementation of evolutionary algorithms written in Java. After an introduction the kind of genetic representation used in the toolkit is discussed and provided genetic operators are introduced. Thereafter the concept of breaking an evolutionary algorithm into components and the definition of interfaces for these components is discussed. On that basis a controller model for flexibel and fast creation of algorithms is presented. The paper concludes with a section dealing with issues of parallelization of evolutionary algorithms and gives a short outlook on future work.