I am developing a Spring MVC web application and I keeps JPA entities in repository package, dao's and controller classes in separate packages with jsp's in a folder in WEB-INF.
My question is, in this app, what is the model, what is the controller and what is the view? Where should I keep the business logic (dao or controller)? What is the best practice in terms of clear separation of business logic?
For what you are describing, the layers are as follow :
view : JSP files
controller : the DispatcherServlet (front controller) and you controller classes
model : all what remains
For the latter part of your question, you are in fact asking for opinion based answers. But the following seems to be a common pattern :
If you put business logic in controller you get a Fat Stupid Ugly Controller (just google around). Even if Spring MVC gives you tools to test controllers, the common usage is to avoid it, because the controller is heavily dependent on framework, and it is best to make business logic as independent as possible of framework. One never knows, you may have to use a different framework later for any reason.
It is equally bad to put business logic in DAO for same reason : framework independance.
My advice is to add a service layer between controller and DAO, with a possibility of exception for a true CRUD application. It is a layer with less framework dependance ; and in fact the reason why it is generally not produced by framework : the framework cannot know your business logic. There's another reason for the service class, it is the layer where transaction demarcation should live : controllers hardly support JDK proxying (which is the default transaction demarcation in Spring framework), and it can be relevant to call more than one DAO method in one single transaction.
But I must admit that the above is my opinion and not the big truth (well not only mine, but definitely an opinon). You can certainly find use cases where business logic is so tiny that it does not require the overhead or a service layer : it is just an architectural choice, and provided you know why you make the choice any possibility can be good.
Related
I'm trying to learn dependency injection. The book/example I am following seems to be using an MVC project as just the UI layer within a broader architecture. The example includes a separate project for the domain layer and yet another project for the data access layer.
When I first learned MVC I came away thinking MVC was the entire architecture. V for view for UI layer, C for controller for domain layer, and M for model for data access layer.
So is using an MVC project as only the UI layer a proper and/or commonly accepted application of the MVC framework?
So is using an MVC project as only the UI layer a proper and/or commonly accepted application of the MVC framework?
Yes.
While it is possible to make an application entirely within the context of ASP.NET MVC, doing so means that the application will have to be written from scratch to use a different UI framework. Isolating the business logic into a separate set of services that are not coupled to ASP.NET MVC means that only the top layer would need to be replaced to move to a different UI framework, which also means that the application's lifecycle may extend beyond the end of ASP.NET MVC and/or it can be made into an application with a different UI framework (WebApi, WPF, etc) without too much trouble.
The purpose of dependency injection is to decouple your services from all other parts of the application, including each other. So by extension, it is only natural to build the business layer separately from the UI layer. Whether you physically have them in one assembly or multiple is really just a matter of preference.
Applying SRP to the MVC design pattern will lead you there. Same goes for MVVM. You are extracting logic from Model to other classes like Interactors, Services, Repositories etc.
From any point of view this is perfectly normal(and desirable). Your Model is just an abstraction of Several different layers.
I would suggest you to take a look at VIPER (not a car) - https://www.objc.io/issues/13-architecture/viper/ and you will see something that is occuring to you right now.
I am using spring 3.0 with annotation which i am creating dao interface , then dao implementation class,
then creating service interface and then creating service implementation class.
and using object of service implementation into controller. this process is too lengthy.
can i use only dao class and directly use it in controller?
#service
#controller
public class MyController { ... }
You can but you really really really shouldn't. If you have any plans of putting this code into production, then you need to keep your layers well defined. This is because each layer has a different responsibility.
Your DAO layer is responsible for all database access. It doesn't care what object you want, what you want to do with it, and when you want it done. It only cares about how it's done.
Your Service layer is responsible for what you want to do to your objects. It contains all of your business logic, convenience methods and may use multiple DAO's inside a single service. Your service layer is where you handle your database transactions as well.
Your controller layer is responsible for how you want to show your data to the user. It only contains services and minimal logic concerned with how to display the data returned by your service layer.
I think there are 2 distinct questions being asked here :
Is it really necessary to have all three layers : web layer, service layer, and DAO ?
and :
Do Spring beans necessarily need to implement and interface and to bve (auto)wired by interface rather thant concrete class ?
The answer to both is the same : it is not a necessity, but it is strongly recommended for anything other thant trivial projects.
For the first question, yes it is better so separate concerns in different layers. However I must admint that my controllers sometimes access the DAOs directly for simple read-only tasks in some projects. Sometimes the service layer seems like too much when all it does is to map the DAO methods. However I always use a service layer for transactional business logic that actually modifies the data.
For the second question : Spring can, without problem, instantiate and inject beans that don't implement any interface. However you will start to have problems if you use more advanced stuff linked to aspect-oriented programming, the most common being the #Transactional annotation. In this case Spring has to create proxies to your objects, and it is all simpler to create proxies of interfaces. Ohterwise it has to manipulate bytecode and it introduces limitations.
Perhaps more importantly, "programming to an interface" is a good practice regardless if you are using Spring or not, or even Java or anothrer language. A simple google search will bring up many good articles on this, or SO questions such as this one.
So again, while you can live well without both things in the short term, both will make your life much better in the long term.
I have a project in which I am using NHibernate and ASP.Net MVC. The application is intended to allow users to track certain data and then produce views of statistics based upon the data entered. The structure of my application thus far looks something like this:
NHibernate Layer: Contains Repository<T> and UnitOfWork classes, as well as entity mapping definitions.
Core/Service Layer: Contains generic EntityService class. At the moment, this simply defines transaction scope via IUnitOfWork and interfaces with IRepository to provide higher-level data access services.
Presentation Layer (MVC Application): Not yet implemented, but contains the usual stuff plus dependency injection.
I have a couple of questions:
Is it poor design to allow my MVC application to handle dependency injection for ALL layers? For example, as well as dependency injection of EntityService instances into controllers, it will handle the dependency injection of IRepository into the EntityService classes. Should the service layer handle this itself, even though this would mean performing dependency injection in two distinct places?
Where should I produce my statistics? This business logic doesn't seem to belong in my service layer, which, at present, only contains entity type definitions and an interface for modifying and accessing entity properties. I have a few thoughts on this, but I'm not sure which I like best:
Keep my service layer as is and create a separate Statistics project - this is completely independent of the entity types for which it will be used, meaning my MVC controllers will have to pass raw numerical information between my business entities and my (presumably static) statistics classes. This is quite a neat separation but potentially means a lot of business logic still remaining in the presentation layer.
Create a Statistics project; however, create a tight coupling between the classes in this project and my business entities. For example, instead of passing a Reading object's values into a method, I will pass the entire object (or define them as extension methods). This will shift business logic out of my MVC app but the tight coupling seems a bit messy.
Keep all of my business logic inside my service layer. Define strongly-typed subclasses of EntityService, so my services contain both entity-specific business methods and data storage methods, while keeping the entity classes themselves as pure data containers. Create a separate Statistics project for any generic statistical processing and call its methods via my derived service classes. My service classes effectively merge business functions with the storage functionality provided created by IRepository<T>.
I am erring toward the third option but does anyone have any thoughts? Alternative suggestions?
Thanks in advance!
Preliminary observation:
I like the way in which you described your project, I just didn't get why your Data Access Layer (DAL) is called NHibernate Layer: it is odd with all the rest in which you didn't use technology name to describe a logical layer (correctly). So I suggest you to rename it DAL, and use it to abstract your app from NHibernate.
My opinions about your questions:
Absolutely no. It is good to apply Dependency Injection to All Layers. A couple or reasons for which it is good:
1.1 Testing: you can mock DAL interfaces and do unit test Service Layer w/o DAL using another DI config file. In the same way you can mock Service for Web Controllers layer and so on.
1.2 Different DAL implementations: suppose you need different DAL implementation (NOSQL, SQL or LINQ instead of NHibernate, etc..) technologies for different deployment of you project or to scale in the future. You can do that easily maintaining different DI config files.
You can have the same layer deployed in different projects. In the same way you can have a project containing different layers. I think their relation is orthogonal: project is describing a physical (development time and run time) implementation. Layers are logical. So initially I would keep it simple with the third option.
I just don't understand why you saying the following regarding this option:
Create a separate Statistics project for any generic statistical
processing and call its methods via my derived service classes. My
service classes effectively merge business functions with the storage
functionality provided created by IRepository.
I see Statistics as one or more services so you can implement it as namespace with classes inside your Service Layer. And, as any other service, you can inject DAL Repository classes. And, as any other Service/DAL, the Model classes can be shared between different Services and DAL classes.
StatsService.AverageReadingFor(Person p, DateTime start, DateTime end) sounds good.
There are several implementation options:
Using underlying repository features (for example: SQL avg function)
Using Observer Pattern which is implementable also using Dependency Injection
Using Aspect Oriented Programming. See that Spring.Net chapter as an example.
If you have more than one Service Layer instance (more than one server) than 2 and 3 must be adapted for out of process communication using a messaging system.
Just an update - Regarding my second question, I have decided to define an IStatsService<T> which expects an IEntityService<T> to be passed into its constructor. I'll use this for generic statistical processing of business entities and create further interfaces that implement IStatsService<T> where I need more type-specific information.
Hopefully this will help someone who has been scratching their head about a similar problem!
I am using MVC3 for my application and I have a question about validation. I have a Business Logic layer that is separate from my web layer where I will have a function like CreateUser, which creates a new user for the application to use. I want this function to be accessible in two places: 1) Somewhere in a controller that makes use of it and 2) in a "Setup Data" program that inserts data into the system.
I want to make use of things like ModelState.IsValid to check for all basic validation, but this won't help me for my Setup Data mode (or any other mode that doesn't go through MVC). Is there any way I can still leverage this code, but to contain all validation in my BusinessLogic layer instead of in the controller without having the BusinessLogic layer rely on MVC?
Thanks.
It looks like this article about Service Layers has what I need. Other suggestions are still welcome. Thanks.
Note that the article on service layers still means that you need a dependency on the MVC assembly. After wrestling a bit with this myself recently, I'm now of the opinion that keeping things as separate as possible is a good design. In my model assembly, I have a services folder wherein from, say, a Create() routine, I validate and throw custom exceptions.
The service layer doesn't care who or how these exceptions are consumed. In your MVC app, map them into model state errors collections or whatever. Your design is all the more solid because your model assembly doesn't depend on some validation runner making appropriate use of MVC validation attributes, collections, etc.
I also noticed the article mentions a repository. I know it's all the rage these days but if you're already using an ORM like Entity Framework, a repository is really just a DAO. Reposity is the new Singleton.
I am a big fan of Dependency Injection and the Play Framework, but am having trouble seeing how the two could be exploited together.
There are modules for Spring and Guice, but the way that Play works makes it hard for me to see how DI could be beneficial beyond some quite simple cases.
A good example of this is that Play expects JPA work to be done by static methods associated with the entity in question:
#Entity
Person extends Model {
public static void delete(long id) {
em().find(id).remove();
}
//etc
}
So there is no need for a PersonManager to be injected into controllers in the way it might for a Spring J2EE application. Instead a controller just calls Person.delete(x).
Obviously, DI is beneficial when there are interfaces with external systems, as the concrete implementation can be mocked for testing etc., but I don't see much benefit for a self-contained Play application.
Does anyone have any good examples? Does anyone use it to inject a Manager-style class into Controllers so that a number of operations can be done within the same transaction, for example?
I believe from this sentence you wrote:
"Does anyone have any good examples? Does anyone use it to inject a Manager-style class into Controllers so that a number of operations can be done within the same transaction, for example?"
that before answering the DI question I should note something: transactions are managed automatically by Play. If you check the model documentation you will see that a transaction is automatically created at the beginning of a request, and committed at the end. You can roll it back via JPA or it will be rolled back if an exception is raised.
I mention this because from the wording of your sentence I'm not sure if you are aware of this.
Now, on DI itself, in my (not-so-extensive) experience with DI, I've seen it used mainly to:
Load the ORM (Hibernate) factory/manager
Load Service classes/DAOs into another class to work with them
Sure, there are more scenarios, but these probably cover most of the real usage. Now:
The first one is irrelevant to Play as you get access to your JPA object and transaction automatically
The second one is quite irrelevant too as you mainly work with static methods in controllers. You may have some helper classes that need to be instantiated, and some may even belong to a hierarchy (common interface) so DI would be beneficial. But you could just as well create your won factory class and get rid of the jars of DI.
There is another matter to consider here: I'm not so sure about Guice, but Spring is not only DI, it also provides a lot of extra functionalities which depend on the DI module. So maybe you don't want to use DI in Play, but you want to take advantage of the Spring tools and they will use DI, albeit indirectly (via xml configuration).
The problem in my humble opinion on the static initialization approach of Play! is that it makes testing harder. Once you approach the HTTP vs Object Orientation problem with static members and objects that carries the HTTP message data (request and response) you make a trade of having to create new instances for each request by the ability of make your objects loosely coupled with the rest of your project classes.
One good example of a different design are servlets, it also extends a base class but it approaches the problem with a single instance creation (by default, because there are configurations that enable more instances).
I believe that maybe a mix of the two approaches would be better, having a singleton of each controller would give the same characteristics of a full static class and would allow dependency injection of some kinds of object. But not the objects with request or session scope, once the controller would need to be created every new request. Moreover it would improve testability by inverting the control of dependency injection, thus allowing arbitrary injection points.
Dependencies would be injected by the container or by a test, probably using mocks for the heavy stuff that much likely would already have been tested before.
In my point of view, this static model pushes the developer away from testing controllers because extending FunctionalTest starts the application server, thus paying the price of heavy objects like repositories, services, crawlers, http clients, etc. I don't want to wait a lot of objects to be bootstrapped just to check if some code was executed on the controller, tests should be quick and clear to make developers love them as their programming assistant/guide.
DI is not the ultimate solution to use everywhere... Don't use DI just because you have it in your hands... In play, you don't need DI to develop controllers/models etc... but sometimes it could be a nice design: IMO, you could use it if you have a service with a well know interface but you would like to develop this service outside Play and test it outside play and even test your play project with just a dummy service in order NOT to depend on the full service implementation. Therefore DI can be interesting: you plug the service loosely in play. In fact, this is the original use case for DI afaik...
I just wrote a blog post about setting up a Play Framework application with Google Guice. http://geeks.aretotally.in/dependency-injection-with-play-framework-and-google-guice
I see some benefits, especially when a component of your application requires a different behavior based on a certain context or something like that. But I def believe people should be selective about what goes into a DI context.
It shows again that you should only use dependencies injection if you really have a benefit. If you have complex services it's useful, but in many cases it's not. Read the chapter about models in the play-documentation.
So to give you an example where you can use DI with play. Perhaps you must make a complex calculation, or you create a pdf with a report-engine. There I think DI can be useful, specially for testing. There I think the guice-module and spring-module are useful and can help you.
Niels
As of a year and some change later, Play 2.1 now has support for dependency injection in controllers. Here's their demo project using Spring 3, which lays it out pretty clearly.
Edit: here's another example using Guice and Scala, if that's your poison.