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.
Related
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 at my new job and the projects at work are in spring 2.5 (some portlets). how hard is it to migrate to spring 3 ?
there is a customized portal 1.0 (don't know if this is relevant) and i was wondering if i could just ask to develop in spring 3.
never used spring before and want to learn some, but it would be nice if i could just go for the latest version. got spring in action 3rd edition and would like to make use of that
It principle, it should be a drop-in replacement. There's a bunch of stuff that was deprecated in Spring 3, and huge amount of new stuff added, but nothing was removed.
However, there were a bunch of minor bug fixes, and your code may be unwittingly relying on the buggy behaviour, so some minor adjustments may be necessary, but nothing any worse than that.
Other than that, the big difference is that Spring 3 requires Java5+. I'm assuming you're not stuck on 1.4 :)
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.
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.
Spring roo is new framework and I found it very interesting. I have been working on web application for last 3-4 years and Always found JSPs are hard to maintain across teams if everyone is not disciplined enough about separation of markup and serverside logic. I have used JackBe/BackBase in last projects and I enjoyed xml templates working as views. This was much better than JSPs. But I couldnt automate webtests through selenium for backbase.
I would be surely using Spring MVC (-view), Hibernate on the backend. I found Wicket as good alternative. Have you used wicket along with Spring and what was your experience?
First, Spring Roo is a code generator tool (similar to Grails commands system):
(source: springsource.com)
Second, Spring Roo applications currently use Spring Web Flow for the view and Spring for the glue.
So, while you can compare (Spring Web Flow + Spring) and (Wicket + Spring), the later combo doesn't offer anything comparable to Roo out of the box (maybe AppFuse or AppFuse Light but you didn't mention them and they are third-party projects).
In other words, I don't think that "Spring Roo vs (Wicket and Spring)" makes sense.
Our current project uses Spring and Wicket, we have always used Spring but switched to Wicket a year ago. Few advices:
Get the "Wicket in Action" book.
The user mailing list is very helpful.
Make sure you understand Wicket's programming model especially the session serialization related stuff (the book does not help enough in this area IMHO).
Wicket is good at building stateful pages, it requires more work to build stateless pages.
There are some good UI widgets available like inmethod DataGrid.
It's easy to inject your Spring beans in your pages or components.
Spring Roo is still in beta (1.0 M2), so it may be a little early.
We also considered Tapestry 5 but we thought it was a bit young a year ago.
Spring Roo 1.0.0 (GA) has now been released, complete with around 100 pages of documentation.
If you're wondering about what Roo is and why use it, I recommend you take a read of the introductory chapter of the reference guide. It covers this and more.
#Antony, GWT support is a major priority for Roo and something I am currently working on. Expect to see some interesting integration in the very near future.
I was at the SpringOne conference in Amsterdam earlier this year when they announced Roo. My impression (and that of my colleague who was there) was that Roo was good if you were generating a web-based CRUD application every few weeks - they pitched it as the pure Java version of Grails (which is RoR for Java).
Didn't look interesting for anyone else - but that's just an opinion.
I've seen a demo of Roo a few months ago. It looks a lot like Grails (another spring technology), except that instead of creating artifacts for the Groovy language, you create them for Java.
Still it enforces good practice and makes you apply the MVC pattern in a clean way.
Personally, the demo didn't make me change my preferred toolkit (Grails), but that's because I can achieve faster results with Groovy (parsing xml for example is much more "painful" in Java than in Groovy). Also, with Grails I can see the changes I make instantly without having to recompile my entire project and relaunch the application each time I want to see the results.
Last but not least, in Grails you have tons of plugins to make fancy Ajax websites (ZK for example, if you want to avoid Javascript, but there are plugins for GWT, Yahoo, Dojo, etc...).
So, if you don't want to learn Groovy (which is not too difficult if you already know Java), Roo is the way to go to build clean web projects with all the power of Hibernate and Spring.
I hope this helps...
Why use Roo when one can build something w/ GWT and end up w/ a far richer better outcome and without the constraints of Roo and its architecture. Spring Web Flow is yesterdays technology.
It completely depends on what your requirements are. If it's a small site then Component Oriented frameworks like GWT or Wicket are a must as they make things really easy.
How soon with Roo support GWT? I think that the use of GWT by Roo makes it a huge win for GWT and Roo!
Roo and GWT are available today in pre-release form. In my opinion, definitely not ready for prime time.