I know the title may seem like apples & oranges, but hear me out... :)
I'm building the architecture of an MVC app and considering what to use for the core of the controller / services. This stack will also serve as a RESTful API which will be equally as important as the UI.
I'm narrowing down my stack to be built with either Grails or JAX-RS (at this point I've ruled out other options and am not super interested in expanding this list). Either way I'll be using Groovy, and my model and views will be virtually unaffected by this choice, so that further levels some of the differences between the two. Here are the pros/cons that I've been pondering and was wondering if anyone had any other inputs or caveat experiences.
Grails
I am not going to use a ton of the built-in Grails features (GSP/SiteMesh, Hibernate, nearly all plugins), so I'm concerned that Grails might be a bit heavy for my purposes
I'm concerned that I won't have enough control over my ability to handle the REST API since it is very view-centric
I've seen inconsistencies in the quality of plugins to the point where I'm not sure I consider them much of a 'pro'
I love the convention-over-configuration & edit-and-refresh, to the point where I'd probably want to wire up something similar if I go with JAX-RS
I like the grails command line for everything it streamlines, but I'm concerned that it might get in my way since I'm not using as much of the stack
I like the scaffolding but since I'm not using Hibernate or GSP/SiteMesh it might not mesh well
JAX-RS
JAX-RS is made for REST. This will make my RESTful API really a snap to implement as I have complete control
Groovy is an important part of what makes Grails shine, so I'll benefit from that even in JAX-RS
I love how JAX-RS doesn't automatically pull in a bunch of other things so I can have more control of what components are in/out
unfortunately since it doesn't pull in everything else anything that I end up needing will require more work, whereas Grails might have a plugin
the grails command line and scaffolding will be missed; perhaps Maven can fill some gaps
It seems like the capabilities of each for creating actions and routing are pretty similar (although the implementation styles are different). In fact there are other SO questions wish touch upon this so I'm not too concerned.
I wrote a small REST service prototype in several frameworks last year (namely Grails, Play!, Spring MVC, Jersey, Restlet). My feeling about Grails in this concern was that although Grails supports REST style architecture, it isn't really made for it. I don't want to get religious here, so if you only want to map resources to URLs and HTTP verbs your fine, but if you want to dig deeper into REST with tight control over return codes, location headers, etc. you might still be able to do it with Grails, but it is probably better supported in a pure REST framework.
Grails also comes with a lot of dependencies, which might not be a problem if you're starting on a green field, but can cause problems when you have to integrate it with existing legacy components or frameworks.
From the two used REST frameworks, I liked Jersey more, as it just worked in my case and the documentation was good (although a bit focused on Maven and Netbeans).
Yeah, it does seem heavy to build on a MVC framework when you're not going to use the model or the view. While the autowiring and simplified configuration is super nice, Grails would still be providing a lot of extra stuff that you don't need.
I'd personally take the lighter approach and leave Grails out, using any standalone libraries or writing custom code which provide the features that you do want. There's a number of container projects listed on the Groovy site, perhaps Spring or one of the alternatives would add some value to your architecture.
Related
I'm thinking about adding GraphQL functionalities to my Spring Boot application.
I found there are two artifacts for that.
One is com.graphql-java-kickstart:graphql-spring-boot-starter and the other is com.graphql-java:graphql-spring-boot-starter.
Which one should I choose?
These are different Starters (by different teams) providing different features, so there's no right or wrong answer. Here's a quick overview of what I'm aware is available:
The original starter made by the graphql-java team (com.graphql-java:graphql-spring-boot-starter) is now, I believe, defunct and superseded by the Spring GraphQL.
Spring GraphQL (org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web or org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-webflux) is intended for schema-first development, is relatively simple and not very feature rich, but it's easy to use and works well with other Spring projects (like e.g. WebFlux and Spring Security).
If you want to go code-first (which I argue is still schema-first, just better), use graphql-spqr-spring-boot-starter, which will generate the GraphQL schema and an end-point for you, with no extra code needed. It's quickest way possible to expose Spring services. There's a sample project here. I'm the main author of that project, so this is a shameless plug, but I honestly believe it's lightyears ahead of other projects in terms of usability. The next version will be based on Spring GraphQL, so it should inherit most/all benefits as well (like e.g. RSocket support, which it currently lacks).
There's also DGS by Netflix (com.netflix.graphql.dgs:graphql-dgs-spring-boot-starter). It is also schema-first, has a plenty of features, but is also highly opinionated. I have no first-hand experience with it, but it is well documented, so you should have no problems finding what you need about it.
If you're already using graphql-java-tools (maintained by the Kickstart team), you'll likely want to go for com.graphql-java-kickstart:graphql-spring-boot-starter as they're intended to be used together. I have no clue how actively this project is maintained these days.
I'm coming to SpringMVC from the world of PHP, precisely I was working with Symfony for several years.
For your information, in Symfony, there are plugins and bundles that are created by other developers so that you could use them in your project. When I come to Spring, I don't find these notions or may be I've missed something !?.
For example, I'm looking for a component that does the registration and login form, which I think that must be done many times already, and I don't want to reinvent the wheels certainly.
So, my question is, I wonder if in Spring, are there possibilities to have and how to use reusable components?
Authentication is directly supported by the Java EE spec. You don't even need any particular framework for that. Every web container supports it out of the box. If you want some additional functionalities (like remember-me, etc.), loot at spring-security.
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.
I have looked at Spring MVC a few times briefly, and got the basic ideas. However whenever I look closely it seems to require you already know a whole load of 'core Spring'. The book I have for instance has a few hundred pages before it gets onto Spring MVC... which seems a lot to wade through. I'm used to being able to jump in, but there's so much bean-related stuff and XML, it just looks like a mass of data to consume.
Does it simplify if you put the time in, or is Spring just a much bigger framework than I thought? is it possible to learn this side of it in isolation?
#John Spring just a much bigger framework than I thought? - probably so, at least I thought so.
is it possible to learn this side of it in isolation? - Yes , here is a good way to learn your way http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/spring-framework-reference/html/spring-web.html
And also I'd recommend you read a book manning spring in action 2nd edition, I also was learning spring from zero, and now I'm comfortable with it after reading this book, of course you have to refer to reference every now and then.
Here is where you can get basic info about MVC concept if you are not already familiar with(its in php, but important thing is point not syntax)
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/mvc-for-noobs/
EDIT
If you want to see MVC in action, with examples or other spring uses use this repository https://src.springframework.org/svn/spring-samples to checkout some projects , you'll see mvc-basic, mvc-ajax ..etc this is really good resource , you can checkout projects with Tortoise SVN on windows or subeclipse from eclipse
At least you need to understand the core Spring - dependency injection, application context configuration and so on. It's actually not too complex, just a bit hard to start. For an experienced developer it might make sense to take a look at some sample app for the basic setup.
ps. I've got this sample project for JSF/Spring/JPA/Hibernate combination. Not Spring-MVC, but may be still helpful.
I myself am trying to learn Spring MVC from NetBeans official documentation from here:
http://netbeans.org/kb/docs/web/quickstart-webapps-spring.html
Coming from ASP.Net/C#, it feels like there are so many steps to do in that simple example.
The great thing about Spring is that you can pick and choose what you use. If you want to use Spring, you don't have to jump in head first, you can just try it out by, say, using the Dependency Injection features, or by using the JDBC Template stuff. My recommendation would be to start small, and see how you like it.
To use the Web MVC stuff, you will need to understand Dependency Injection for configuring your controllers. You can choose to use the older more flexible XML-style configuration, or you can use the newer Annotations. Or you can mix and match. Starting with XML would probably be best as it will help you understand how stuff is working (it'd be like learning C and C++ before Java). Then you can move to using Annotations. Personally, I use XML to instantiate all my beans. I use the #Autowire annotation to inject dependencies. This seems to be the sweet spot for most flexibility and ease of use.
I'm looking to make a website that will probably get some heavy, repetitive traffic. Is grails up to the task?
I agree with lael, also because it's built on java technologies there are a lot of proven clustering and 'enterprisey' tools available which allow you to easily scale across multiple application services.
The cloud tools around Grails are also becoming very good and make deploying to a cloud like EC2 very easy. I've recently been using Cloud Foundry and found it very good.
As the first poster points out however, you can write a badly performing application in any framework/language. One thing I'd recommend is getting a good understanding of Hibernate which is the underlying persistence library. If you understand how that works, it should help you avoid making any silly mistakes at the DB level. On this side of things, a tool like p6spy is great for checking what the database is up to during normal use. It should help you spot any repetitive queries.
The scalability of your web application won't really depend on what language/framework you choose to use, but rather how your application is built. You can build a scalable web application in Grails, just as you can build an incredibly slow application in C++. If Grails is the framework you would like to use, then use it; you can always rewrite the slow parts in Java or another fast language, if need be. (After all, that's what Twitter did with Scala.)
Disclaimer: I've never actually used Grails.
Grails is essentially a thin layer on top of the Spring Framework, which many consider to be a very scalable framework in the enterprise world. Spring + Hibernate has become a standard in many Java shops around the globe.
If you run into performance bottlenecks in Groovy, you can always rewrite those parts in Java.
Take a look at the Success Stories for examples of sites that were written in Grails. The Testamonials are also a good place to look for examples. You will use a little more memory(heap and permgen) than a vanilla Java app, but you can tune it just like you would any other Java application.
On the low end you aren't going to find $3/month Hosting options that you could with PHP stack (for example). That said, there are some good caching solutions for Grails apps EhCache, MemCache, etc. Beyond that you can also setup an Apache layer to caches static resources or whatever you need.
Don't mean to pile on here. You've already got some great answers but I just want to add on thing that I was reminded of recently. Scalability depends not only on the software you write (regardless of language/framework) but also on the deployment environment. A very well written application deployed on an undersized or poorly configured server will not scale at all. If you do use Grails or any other Java based framework, the default settings on your container (Tomcat, JBoss, etc.) will probably not be what you need.
Just something to keep in mind,
Dave
Grails run on the JVM. Simply put, you will not find a more scalable, solid and robust runtime platform than the JVM, anywhere. That's Grails's big advantage over, say, PHP or RoR.