I recently worked on a project which uses Spring Data REST with Spring Boot. While it is GREAT to harness the power of Spring Data REST and build a powerful web service in no time, I have come to regret one thing: how tightly coupled the "presentation" layer (JSON returns) is to the underlying data structure.
Sure, I have used Projections and ResourceProcessors to manipulate the JSON, but that still does not completely sever ties with the database structure.
I want to introduce Controllers to the project, to integrate some of the "old" ways of building a web service in Spring. But how should I draw the line? I don't want to eradicate Spring Data REST from my project.
I am sure many of you have faced similar decisions, so any advice would be most appreciated!
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We are beginning the process of re-architecting the systems within our company.
One of the key components of the work is a new data model which better meets our requirements.
A major part of the initial phase of the work is to design and build a data migration tool.
This will take data from one or more existing systems and migrate it to the new model.
Some requirements:
Transformation of data to the new model
Enrichment of data, with default values or according to business rules
Integration with existing systems to pull data
Integration with Salesforce CRM which is being introduced into the company.
Logging and notification about failures
Within the Spring world, which is the best Spring project to use as the underlying framework for such a data migration tool?
My initial thoughts are to look at implementing the tool using Spring Integration.
This would:
Through the XML or DSL, allow for the high level data flow to be seen, understood, and edited (possibly using a visual tool such as a STS plugin). Being able to view the high level flow in such a way is a big advantage.
Connectors to work with different data sources.
Transformers components to be built to migrate data formats.
Routers to route the data in the new model to endpoints which connect with systems.
However, are there other Spring projects, such as Spring Data or Spring Batch, which are a better match for the requirements?
Very much appreciate feedback and ideas.
I would certainly start with spring-integration which exposes bare bones implementation for Enterprise Integration Patterns which are at the core of most/all of your requirements listed.
It is also an exceptionally great problem modelling tool which helps you better understand the problem and then envision its implementation in one cohesive integration flow
Later on, once you have a clear understanding of how things are working it would be extremely simple to take it to the next level by introducing the "other frameworks" you mentioned/tagged adding #spring-cloud-data-flow and #spring-cloud-stream.
Overall this question is rather broad, so consider following the above pointers and get started and raise more concrete questions.
I have used spring 3 but not sure what is the equivalent of a grails plugin. And now need to suggest a stack for a new app. Looking at grails it seems to be great for making data base models and has a lot of plugins. but it seems its more expensive at runtime.
So my question is that is there a equal or better repo of spring for every little thing you can need like facebook login or other social actions, ajax upload, joda etc or is this what we call a dependency and some code from a blog/ stack?
Is there any repo of small reusable code like we have on grails plug ins for regular spring mvc projects?
I know that your question is about pure spring alternatives, but I would honestly recommend just using Grails. I've done projects in both stacks. If you want to get rid of the configuration headaches and get started quickly on a new project while staying within the Spring stack, it is the way to go. It is a great framework and some of my employers have many production Grails applications supporting thousands of customers.
You can also upgrade to Grails 3 when it comes out next year and take advantage of the leaner code they provide in it due to Spring Boot!
You may need to check into Spring Boot. It does not provide a full stack framework, but it is hiding much of the extra coding you may need to do for a spring application. There are some new projects that enable you to get the benefits of spring boot. Check the below projects:
1- http://jhipster.github.io/ , use it if you need to make SPA with AngularJS also have commands to generate Entities for you using Yeoman
2- http://lightadmin.org/ , use it if you want to create CRUD pages based on Spring Data Entities
For both, you may have to use Spring Data and maybe even Spring Data REST. These may be helpful too.
Currently We have an enterprise application that works with spring and JPA.
Today we are planning our next generation server.
We are debating whether to use spring-data in our project? It seems to increase productivity and development times.
Are there any alternatives to spring-data to consider? Why not using spring and JPA alone?
What do you suggest?
Bear in mind we are starting to develop from scratch so no constraints are available other than:
we use mysql and mongoDB
we code in java
we will develop client side code in GWT.
Currently we have a layered architecture.
We have a Service layer and a manager layer, which takes care for persisting and business logic. Whoever built that didn't see a good reason to insert the third DAO layer.
There are some technical benefits of Spring Data over Spring + JPA, which in a pure SQL environment, I think give Spring Data an advantage:
Spring Data uses the same CrudRepository interface for all implementations, so you'll have less effort to switch between JPA to MongoDB
Spring Data saves you writing the same methods again and again. You just add the method to the interface and it'll generate it for you (e.g. UserRepository.findByUsername())
You can save boilerplate on REST implementations for JPA, MongoDB and others (see http://projects.spring.io/spring-data-rest/)
If you wanted to experiment with other persistence or indexing services, then there are Spring Data implementations for both mature and newer technologies such as for Neo4j, Hadoop, Solr, ElasticSearch, fuzzydb.
Given that you use MySQL and MongoDB, I think Spring Data is a strong candidate, as it allows developers to code to a single data access API (Spring Data) instead of two (JPA and the MongoDB Java Client).
Regarding the existing architecture, it sounds as though your manager layer is implementing either a Rich Domain pattern, or Active Record.
Spring Data is in my view very well suited to Rich Domain when combined with injection of services using Spring's #Configurable.
Lastly, I'd say that Spring Data also gives a significant advantage when needing to implement services for things like Spring Security and Spring Social, which use MongoDB or others instead of SQL.
We did this in the fuzzydb sample webapp that can be found here. (Disclaimer: I'm the currently sole recent committer on fuzzydb, and haven't touched it for a number of years, but we did have a live service, www.fridgemountain.com, based on that code, but neglected to promote it)
I am using hibernate to persist data on a MySql database.
Now I am already configuring what my business model is in the hibernate configuration file.
What I am looking for is, are there any tools that on building/deploying the application will generate the Model Layer (POJOs), Persistence Layer and the Service Layer (Business logic) for the controllers to communicate with the database server. In short I wish to generated all the basic essentials from a single configuration point.
Ant or Spring or combination of other frameworks, anything that can achieve the solution.
Any reference to an existence thread or a handful document would be highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Your closest bet is Grails.
I'm not a fan of what you'd like to do. Code generation can result in a brittle system.
spring roo can be also good option to look at as your stack is based on spring framework.
Another option which can be used is MyEclipse IDE for Spring this supports code generation based on domain/table.
I m a newbie & i m good at Struts framework. Today i tried a tutorial for Spring MVC Framework.
The example url that i tried following is as below:
http://static.springsource.org/docs/Spring-MVC-step-by-step/part6.html
I think they have made this tutorial much more complex especially near its end. I saw some errors mainly typos in part 5, part 6 of tutorial. I found Spring framework as not properly organized and how would we know what classes to extend especially when their names are so weird (pardon my language) e.g. AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests.
Overall i found that Spring is making things much more complex than it should be. I'm surprised why there is such a hype about Springs being very easy to learn.
any suggestion how to learn spring easily ? how to judge what to extend ? is there a quick reference or something?
The tutorial you have referred to covers all the layers of the application - data access, business logic and web. For someone who is looking to only get a feel of Spring MVC, which addresses concerns specific to the web layer of the application, this could be more information than required. Probably that is why you got the feeling that the tutorial is complex.
To answer your questions, Spring is easy to learn because the whole framework is designed to work with POJOs, instead of relying on special interfaces, abstract classes or such. Developers can write software as normal Java applications - interfaces, classes and enums and use Spring to wire the components up, without having to go out of the way to achieve the wiring. The tutorial you have referred to tries to explain things in a little bit more detail than experienced programmers would typically do in a real application, probably because the authors wanted the readers to get enough insight into how Spring works so that concepts are understood well.
In most applications (regardless of their size or nature), there is typically no need to extend Spring classes or to implement specialised classes. The Spring community is quite large and an even larger ecosystem of readily available components exists that integrate with Spring. It is therefore very rare that one has to implement a Spring component to achieve something. For example, let us take the example of the data access layer. Different teams like using different approaches to accessing databases. Some like raw JDBC, others like third-party ORMs like iBatis or Hibernate while some others like JPA. Spring distributions contain classes to support all these approaches. Similarly, lets say someone was looking to incorporate declarative transaction management in their application. Again, transaction management can be done in many different ways and a large number of transaction management products are available for people to use. Spring integration is available for most of these products, allowing teams to simply choose which product they want to use and configure it in their Spring application.
Recent Spring releases have mostly done away with extensive XML based configuration files, which being external to the Java code did make Spring application a bit cumbersome to understand. Many things can be done nowadays with annotations. For example,
#Controller
public class AuthenticationController
{
...
}
Indicates that AuthenticationController is a web MVC controller class. There are even ways to avoid using the Controller annotation and follow a convention-over-configuration approach to simplify coding even further.
A good and simple tutorial to Spring MVC is available at http://www.vaannila.com/spring/spring-mvc-tutorial-1.html. This tutorial uses XML based configuration for Spring beans instead of annotations but the concepts remain the same.
I have seen tutorial you follow , Its seems you have follow wrong one first , you first tried to simple one, Instead of tutorials you should go for book first
I recommend you two books to understand the power of Spring
spring in action and spring recipes.
For practical you can use STS a special ide for spring project development.Its have some predefined template you dont't need to write whole configuration yourself.
In starting just see simple tutorials like Spring mvc hello world , form controller than go for big ones
Spring is very cool , All the best.