I'd like to learn Spring MVC framework basis.
My personal experience tells clearly that more than reading manuals, docs, howtos only is only one important part of self-training, but to capitalize real experience you need to solve real problems.
May someone suggest a fake-project that I can implement in my free-time, avoiding only-theoretical approaches and at the same time watch at the main issues of Spring programming?
Does a NerdDinner.com-like free-chapter somewhere exists for Spring?
You could go through each of the Spring samples, and attempt to recreate them on your own.
I have found that a very effective method for learning Spring is to go on the Spring JIRA and solve a bug. It forces you to get down and dirty in the code, and you get to see what's really going on behind the scenes.
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With multiple ways to configure using either XML, Annotations or Java Config and the need to remember 100's of annotations and super-lengthy class-names, the Spring framework appears an extremely complex demon that cannot be understood. Moving from a structured programming paradigm where you are completely in control of the program flow and the code you write, framework driven programming is posing a serious challenge. Can anyone suggest an easy way to transition from structured programming to framework driven approach and also suggest the best way to understand and learn spring.
All resources available on the net have learning methods that keep hopping from one topic to another and seldom able to link different topics and explain subtle differences between scored of annotations that spring framework offers.
I have put out this note after investing two full weeks to just get the basics of "Why Spring" and "How to" using spring scouring hundreds of scattered articles on the net. So, I request all the experts out there not to cancel this question since it sounds very subjective with no straight answers.
Are you telling me there are frameworks that do not require remembering their classes or solutions that they provide?
The best way to learn Spring is to simply get into one by one module and see what it brings to the table. Their official examples are great and you can go through each of them in about 20-30 minutes.
Spring is big, but that is the reason why is it good because it provides many solutions to web issues.
Regarding annotations, why will simply remember which one is for what after enough repetition, the same as you remembered for loop.
As for "Why Spring" official spring site answers that question https://spring.io/why-spring
As for "How to" you can scroll through the following page https://spring.io/
Lagom by default uses Google Guice as implementation od DI pattern.
I would like to use Spring Framework instead.
Is it possible? IF so, how should it be done?
I have successfully integrated Akka with Spring (using hints from documentation and Internet), however I cannot find anything in documentation about integrating with Spring.
Possible? Yes. Will you be constantly swimming upstream, with reach upgrade break in new and unexpected ways requiring you to debug undocumented internal APIs? Most probably.
Lagom is built on Play, Play's DI support is ostensibly pluggable, when I wrote it I hacked together a proof of concept to ensure that Spring could be plugged into it. But it was only ever a proof of concept, neither I or the Play team ever had any desire or intention of maintaining it, so I published my work to GitHub:
https://github.com/jroper/play-spring
So that anyone for whom Spring support was important could continue where I left off. That was 3 years ago. In spite of a community of over a hundred thousand developers, no one ever took the work up. There's not a lot of work to do on the module itself, where most of the work would be is in Play and Lagom to fix areas where they have grown incompatible with Spring.
But really, why do you want to use Spring? The whole Lagom and Play ecosystems are built on Guice, saying you want to use Spring with Lagom is like saying you want to use a narrow gauge train in a country that only has standard guage rails, you're going to have to build yourself an entire new rail system to do so. What do you hope to achieve?
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 am just starting to learn about spring and was looking at the difference between Spring 3.0 and Spring 2.5.
Initially i was following this tutorial http://static.springsource.org/docs/Spring-MVC-step-by-step/index.html which is a step by step guide to developing a Spring MVC application. It is based on Spring 2.5 and i notice there are quite a few differences with Spring 3.0. I tried to find the equivalent tutorial that is based on 3.0 but couldnt find it.
The difference i notice with 3.0 is that there is a lot of use of annotations and a lot of things is done for you in the background. I am sure this is a good thing but i am wondering for the purpose of learning the framework should i continue with 2.5 so that i can understand what goes on behind the scenes before i use spring 3.0?
Please also if you can recommend a spring book that is suitable for a beginner i would appreciate it.
Thanks
I'd recommend to always use the latest version of a framework. Especially if you're starting on a new project. There are always (well usually) tons of improvements, and simplifications, and migrating to the latest version later may be a pain.
Spring has a great user manual (see http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/spring-framework-reference/html/), and IMHO a book doesn't have an added value in this case. I found the Spring user manual always easy to read and understand, so don't get intimidated. I think this is definitely the best starting for beginners as well. You don't have to read it all. Only the sections of interest!
Note that Spring 3.x contains many other improvements such as SpEL (Spring Expression Language), improved web support (you already saw that), REST support, and more.
... should i continue with 2.5 so that i can understand what goes on behind the scenes before i use spring 3.0?
That's really up to you to decide, but if you are going down the Spring 3.x annotation-based route, it is not clear that you >>need<< to understand what is happening behind the scenes. Especially for run-of-the-mill applications.
I was not aware of the purchase of Spring by VMware. Do you think this might affect the open source aspect of Spring in that it might not be open source anymore?
First, the SpringFramework guys are thoroughly committed to open source (from what I can see). So a change would probably entail lots of developers leaving.
Second, most of the people who use Spring do so because it is open source, so a change would risk a major migration of (paying) customers away.
Third, turning Spring into a closed source product would be a politically awful move for VMware, and would likely have fallout for other VMware product lines.
Finally, and most importantly for people committed to using Spring: there is no way that the VMware could legally "undo" the open sourcing of current Spring releases. The best they could do would be say that Spring 4.0 etc was closed source. Anyone who wanted to would be free to continue distributing and using SpringFramework 1.0.x, 2.0.x, 2.5.x, 3.0.x and all associated open sourced technologies. And anyone would be free to create a "fork" of any of them to continue Spring open source development. The only possible issue would be the use of trademarks, and that is easily worked around.
Add that all up, and (IMO) there is nothing to worry about.
"Spring in Action", "Pro Spring", and "Spring Recipes" are the three that I'd recommend to anyone.
If you've never used Spring, I'd say that learning either one will suit your purposes. The majority of Spring 2.5 carries over to 3.0, so it's not wasted.
The books and tutorials haven't kept up with Spring 3.0. Another change between versions was the purchase of Spring by VMWare. They've separated paid support from open source, so it's hard to tell what the future will be for non-paying customers.
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.