We are currently using Spring 3.2.3 + JPA (Hibernate). We use aspects for transaction support as opposed to annotations. We write out own entity services (read: repositories) to abstract the persistence away from our application.
I've read a lot about Spring Data and feel it would make our code considerably cleaner and more robust. I wonder though, are there any gotchas that I should consider before transitioning?
Thanks
If you're already on JPA the transition should be as easy as it can be: activate the repositories, point the infrastructure to your EntityManagerFactoryBean and off you go.
Transactions should just work fine as well. The annotation based usage within Spring Data is selectively activated for the repository beans only. They are configured to take part in existing transactions by default, so any custom larger scoped transaction setting should be in effect already.
Related
I am using Hexagonal Architecture, Hibernate Reactive with Panache and Quarkus in a Kotlin Project.
Transaction boundaries are set using #ReactiveTransactional annotation.
The problem is that I had to add the whole Hibernate Reactive with Panache dependency in the domain and application layers just to make this annotation available.
Is there a way to avoid this?
I was hoping it would be possible to create a domain annotation and then in the adapters layer replace it with the #ReactiveTransactional somehow.
You could remove the annotation from the class, and wrap it into a service, and implement this service in the adapter layer using the annotation.
Don't use database related dependencies inside the hexagon.
The idea is to decouple the business logic from the user interface and infrastructure. Database logic should be placed into an adapter.
It theory it sounds great, in practice that means tons of mappers i.e. boilerplate code. On the bright side you have a Kotlin, and not a Java project so this should be a bit less tedious than the alternative. Bear in mind that there are projects such as Dozer, MapStruct that can make the mapping process easier.
We are creating a web based application using, JSF (Primefaces as presentation library) and Spring Data JPA for data access tier. And the project is Spring Boot enabled.
The project is divided into multiple modules (according to tiers), and one of them is the presentation tier.
Do you suggest creating a dependency from presentation tier to Spring Data (so have access to PageRequest and Slice and ... classes) or not?
Otherwise we shall re-implement these classes in this tier and convert them to Spring Data classes, which seems some how verbose.
Do you suggest creating a dependency from presentation tier to Spring Data (so have access to PageRequest and Slice and ... classes) or not?
Every decision you make will have it's Pros and Cons and it really depends on your specific situation if this is a problem or not.
I see the following things in favor of a dependency:
reuse of PageRequest and similar classes. They represent concepts that are needed when working with persistence but aren't really persistence specific. Therefore there is really no point in duplicating them.
On the other hand, Spring Data contains many classes that don't have any business in a presentation layer. For example, those dealing with creating repositories.
Your task is to determine if the risk/damage of having those classes around is bigger than the benefit of having PageRequest and co available.
With all teams and projects I worked with so far I'd opt for just having a dependency.
Here is why:
The domain has a dependency on JPA and Spring Data anyway. So by depending on the domain-layer, you get a transient dependency, no matter if you want or not.
The persistence specific classes inside Spring Data are so specific that I never experienced anybody trying to use them directly.
Note that especially the first point assumes that you are not copying over your JPA entities in separate transport objects, which would kind of negate the benefits of JPA.
I'm a little confused by the mixed use of JSF2+Spring+EJB3 or any combination of those. I know one of the Spring principal characteristics is dependency injection, but with JSF managed beans I can use #ManagedBean and #ManagedProperty anotations and I get dependency injection functionality. With EJB3 I'm even more confused about when to use it along with JSF or if there is even a reason to use it.
So, in what kind of situation would it be a good idea to use Spring+JSF2 or EJB3+JSF2?
Until now I have created just some small web applications using only JSF2 and never needed to use Spring or EJB3. However, I'm seeing in a lot of places that people are working with all this stuff together.
First of all, Spring and EJB(+JTA) are competing technologies and usually not to be used together in the same application. Choose the one or the other. Spring or EJB(+JTA). I won't tell you which to choose, I will only tell you a bit of history and the facts so that you can easier make the decision.
Main problem they're trying to solve is providing a business service layer API with automatic transaction management. Imagine that you need to fire multiple SQL queries to perform a single business task (e.g. placing an order), and one of them failed, then you would of course like that everything is rolled back, so that the DB is kept in the same state as it was before, as if completely nothing happened. If you didn't make use of transactions, then the DB would be left in an invalid state because the first bunch of the queries actually succeeded.
If you're familiar with basic JDBC, then you should know that this can be achieved by turning off autocommit on the connection, then firing those queries in sequence, then performing commit() in the very same try in whose catch (SQLException) a rollback() is performed. This is however quite tedious to implement everytime.
With Spring and EJB(+JTA), a single (stateless) business service method call counts by default transparently as a single full transaction. This way you don't need to worry about transaction management at all. You do not need to manually create EntityManagerFactory, nor explicitly call em.getTransaction().begin() and such as you would do when you're tight-coupling business service logic into a JSF backing bean class and/or are using RESOURCE_LOCAL instead of JTA in JPA. You could for example have just the following EJB class utilizing JPA:
#Stateless
public class OrderService {
#PersistenceContext
private EntityManager em;
#EJB
private ProductService productService;
public void placeOrder(Order newOrder) {
for (Product orderedproduct : newOrder.getProducts()) {
productService.updateQuantity(orderedproduct);
}
em.persist(newOrder);
}
}
If you have a #EJB private OrderService orderService; in your JSF backing bean and invoke the orderService.placeOrder(newOrder); in the action method, then a single full transaction will be performed. If for example one of the updateQuantity() calls or the persist() call failed with an exception, then it will rollback any so far executed updateQuantity() calls, and leave the DB in a clean and crisp state. Of course, you could catch that exception in your JSF backing bean and display a faces message or so.
Noted should be that "Spring" is a quite large framework which not only competes EJB, but also CDI and JPA. Previously, during the dark J2EE ages, when EJB 2.x was extremely terrible to implement (the above EJB 3.x OrderService example would in EJB 2.x require at least 5 times more code and some XML code). Spring offered a much better alternative which required less Java code (but still many XML code). J2EE/EJB2 learned the lessons from Spring and came with Java EE 5 which offers new EJB3 API which is even more slick than Spring and required no XML at all.
Spring also offers IoC/DI (inversion of control; dependency injection) out the box. This was during the J2EE era configured by XML which can go quite overboard. Nowadays Spring also uses annotations, but still some XML is required. Since Java EE 6, after having learned the lessons from Spring, CDI is offered out the box to provide the same DI functionality, but then without any need for XML. With Spring DI #Component/#Autowired and CDI #Named/#Inject you can achieve the same as JSF does with #ManagedBean/#ManagedProperty, but Spring DI and CDI offers many more advantages around it: you can for example write interceptors to pre-process or post-process managed bean creation/destroy or a managed bean method call, you can create custom scopes, producers and consumers, you can inject an instance of narrower scope in an instance of broader scope, etc.
Spring also offers MVC which essentially competes JSF. It makes no sense to mix JSF with Spring MVC. Further Spring also offers Data which is essentially an extra abstraction layer over JPA, further minimizing DAO boilerplate (but which essentially doesn't represent the business service layer as whole).
See also:
What exactly is Java EE?
JSF Controller, Service and DAO
#Stateless beans versus #Stateful beans
There's no real easy answer here as Spring is many things.
On a really high level, Spring competes with Java EE, meaning you would use either one of them as a full stack framework.
On a finer grained level, the Spring IoC container and Spring Beans compete with the combination of CDI & EJB in Java EE.
As for the web layer, Spring MVC competes with JSF. Some Spring xyzTemplate competes with the JPA interfaces (both can use eg Hibernate as the implementation of those).
It's possible to mix and match; eg use CDI & EJB beans with Spring MVC, OR use Spring Beans with JSF.
You will normally not use 2 directly competing techs together. Spring beans + CDI + EJB in the same app, or Spring MVC + JSF is silly.
I want to implement transaction using Spring's transaction management feature. But I'm not sure which is better(AOP vs #Transactional). Do both features work correctly? Is there any difference in development efficiency?
(Added)
Here AOP means "using AspectJ without using #Transactional annotation explicitly"
(Added)
I want to know difference of annotation-config and XML-based configuration
I've wondered this myself. I found a good discussion of this topic on the Spring forum.
Below I've summarize my take from the aforementioned link:
AOP Transactional Demarcation
Benefits:
Java code is devoid of transaction configuration which is contained instead outside of the code in configuration files
Java code has no direct dependencies on Spring libraries
Transaction management is centralized in one place
Can apply transactional boundaries to source code you can't easily modify
Drawbacks:
AOP complexity. It will not be clear from the code alone where transactional boundaries lie and developers may inadvertently break transactions by, for example, modifying method signatures where a pointcut is applied
The need to touch two locations (source code and AOP configuration) in order to apply transactional boundaries
#Transactional Spring annotation
Benefits:
Transactional boundaries are more clearly understood when examining the source code
Drawbacks:
Java code is coupled with transaction declaration (albeit only at the metadata level, but still a Spring import is required).
The discussion reminds me of JPA annotations versus JPA XML configuration. With XML based JPA configuration, entities are "cleaner", but is the separation worth the effort? Or perhaps even, is the separation harmful (it's nice to be able to open a java source file and know immediately based on the #Entity annotation that the class is an EJB)? In practice, it seems to me that most developers opt to use JPA annotations. Although, in this case unlike #Transactional, jpa annotations are a standard so that may help ease some concerns.
That said, I've been involved on projects were we've used Spring's AOP configuration to annotate a Struts2 (webwork) interceptor to allow a single transaction per request and this worked out great. In this case, we didn't really worry about transactional boundaries in our service layer or elsewhere -- everything was already participating in a transaction and since the view rendered before the interceptor closed the transaction, there was no need to apply an OpenSession/EntityManagerInView solution.
Does anyone know any Java frameworks that follows the repository approach with automatic implementation of query methods (e.g. findByNameAndLastName(…)) but not tied to Spring, only pure JPA. Such feature also exists in GORM. I would like to see if there is any project that can be used in Guice or pure JavaEE environment without bringing Spring as a dependency.
(Disclaimer: I am the author of Spring Data JPA)
There is the CDI Query Module which is very similar to what Spring Data JPA. There's also a DeltaSpike module.
Note that Spring Data JPA ships with a CDI extension that creates repository proxies as plain CDI beans and does not bootstrap a Spring container. There are APIs that allow the creationg of repository proxies programmatically such as:
EntityManager em = // … obtain EntityManager
JpaRepositoryFactory factory = new JpaRepositoryFactory(em);
UserRepository repository = factory.getRepository(UserRepository.class);
Yes, it still requires Spring libraries to be present on the classpath but it is then using them similar to how you would use Commons Collection or the like. We try not to reinvent the wheel and the Spring libraries we depend on provide a lot of useful code that we do not have to re-code.
So if it's Spring as DI container you're worrying about, feel free to give the CDI extension of Spring Data JPA a choice. If you don't want to use any Spring whatsoever (for whatever reason), have a look at the alternatives.
Based on Oliver's information, followed up as also interested in this topic --
CDI Query joining Deltaspike mail thread: http://apache-deltaspike-incubator-discussions.2316169.n4.nabble.com/Porting-the-CDI-Query-extension-project-to-DeltaSpike-td4329922.html
Deltaspike base link: http://deltaspike.apache.org/index.html
Getting started: http://deltaspike.apache.org/documentation.html
Just did their 0.4th release as of 5/31/2013.
However, have not done enough of a review to contrast/compare Deltaspike versus Spring-Data w/ CDI extensions (spring-data being very mature).
Take a look at Tomato on github!
It is a functional replacement for Spring JPA, has zero dependencies, performs better and is far easier to use. It will reduce your data access code by 98% and deliver the results you want right out of the box.
https://rpbarbati.github.io/Tomato.
If you want free, fully functional dynamic forms and/or tables for any Tomato entity or hierarchy, that can also be customized easily, try the angular based companion project...
https://rpbarbati.github.io/Basil
Both are current, maintained projects.
Try it yourself, or contact the author at rodney.barbati#gmail.com with questions.