I'm building a menu with Spring and I'm trying to understand if there is a clean way of doing this. By clean way I mean some module that allows the following:
create a link on a menu entry only if the page shown is not the one to be linked;
apply some CSS class depending on the condition above.
I've just ran accross the spring:url tag: does it have anything to do with what I'm looking for?
No, this is a complexity of user interface way beyond that offered by Spring MVC. You need something higher-level such as JSF or maybe a javascript framework like jquery-ui.
Of course, you could build it yourself using the low-parts provided by Spring MVC, but it's going to be a lot of work.
I would recommend you to have a look at Tiles 2 in combination with SpringMVC. Sample app available on Spring By Example, search for Simple Tiles 2 Spring MVC Webapp.
Related
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.
I've inherited an incomplete but small web project (Java EE 5, running on WebSphere 7).
The project consists mostly of JSPs that are accessed directly via their URL, and most JSPs look up their own reference to the EJBs (services) they need. Also, there's a Servlet for every form that gets submitted by the HTML code in the JSPs.
Architecturally speaking, is there anything wrong with this?
I was thinking it would be better to have an MVC design. I don't want to convert everything to JSF because I don't want to convert all the HTML and embedded Java scriptlets into JSF tags and managed beans.
I don't really want to use Struts or Spring MVC because they're not part of the Java EE 5 toolkit that comes out of the box with WebSphere, and I don't want to add additional complexity with the additional libs and config files.
I was thinking about building my own little MVC with a "ControllerServlet" that accepts a command and dynamically build and execute the command object, and redirect to the JSP view.
But I ask myself again, is there anything "wrong" with JSPs that post to Servlets? It's actually kind of elegant in its simplicity.
What do you think?
Any suggestions are GREATLY appreciated! Rob
You're asking a rather subjective/localized question. But ala.
There's technically nothing wrong with individual JSPs that submit to individual servlets. The only real problem is when the servlets turn out to contain duplicated code for quite common tasks like collecting request parameters, converting/validating them, setting bean properties, invoking actions, performing navigation. That is not DRY and is what a MVC framework with a single front controller and a well definied lifecycle is supposed to solve.
Or, if the servlet's tasks are actually well refactored with homegrown code to perform those common tasks, then this is in turn not very maintainable as no one else than the original developer knows the ins and outs of this custom framework. So it's hard to find anyone else willing to maintain this webapp without learning another framework again which the new developer wouldn't likely to see in other future webapps. That is why companies usually adopt an existing and well-developed MVC framework like JSF, Spring MVC, Stripes, Struts, etc.
Scenario: A fairly mature project uses Struts2 and Spring and Hibernate. I say mature because it has been going on a for a while and there are many struts actions written already.
Suppose we wanted to remove Struts2 from the project and instead depend entirely on Spring MVC without rewriting the entire project.
Is this something that should even be considered?
Are there any migration guides out there?
Has anyone done this before and would like to warn me against it?
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. You have very likely better things to do than a migration that won't add any value to the product (and will certainly introduce some bugs). If I were the business, I would never buy such a migration (with close to zero benefits).
I have to ask: What advantages do you see with Spring MVC that aren't being fulfilled by Struts 2?
If there's not at least a handful of "smoking hot" features, or the amount of time saved is more than enough to overcome the time taken for the migration in the first place then it's probably best to stick with what you have.
You can do it slowly. Struts is a MVC framework. The rest of your application (business and data tiers) are classes which can be invoked by action classes. Struts is a plugin based architecture and it is easy for you to define a plugin in struts configuration file.
Take a look at this link. This may help.
With Struts2 security vulnerabilities being exposed and reported often, this task takes on more importance.
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've got a Spring MVC application and I've decided that I'd like to try using GWT for the front end. I'd like to continue using MVC as I'll also be using Spring Security and some other springy stuff.
I'm aware of the GWT-SL project, and I guess I'll use it. The documentation is light on examples unfortunately.
What I'm wondering now is.... how do I reconfigure my project so that I can use GWT? I'm assuming that I'll lose the ability to run in hosted mode, and I suppose that's ok. Do I just add the GWT and GWT-SL jars, reconfigure my web.xml, and add a package to my project for the GWT code?
I'm using Eclipse 3.4. My existing project is standard web project.
With the new version of the GWT plugin, you'd have all the benefits of the hosted mode browser without having to modify any options. The GWTHandler from the GWT-SL will take care of your rpc call mapping. However, you will have a problem with your existing domain objects structure. You will either have to put them in GWT's 'client' package, or mirror your existing domain objects to enable them to be compiled to javascript. I have been looking for a stable non-invasive framework for doing this, but have yet to find one. Gilead looks promising, but you will have to extend its classes on your domain.
I have posted a view month ago my simple project (3 classes) how to integrate GWT with existing Spring MVC application. Simple sample also provided.
Try it, it is clear and simple: http://code.google.com/p/gspring.
You won't lose hosted mode. I don't know if you're using the internal server for that - I use -noserver so I can't help you there.
Other than that, I guess the documentation is quite clear. Have you hit any specific problems?