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.
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 am learning Java EE and wanna build up a complete management system for a restaurant. Now I am confused what presentation layer should I use for my RMS because I heard that the struts 2 is one of the best UI layer but, the thing is, if I am using spring for my business logic layer then I can use the spring MVC can't I? By the way, I am really interested to build a complete application which is follow the multi-tier architecture.
Yes, of course you can use Spring MVC.
You can use Struts 2 if you'd like as well, because Spring integrates with it nicely.
But I don't see any reason why you'd want to do that. The person who told you that Struts 2 is
one of the best UI layer [sic]
is misguided. If you compare it to Spring MVC, you'll see that the two are based on similar ideas, but Spring improves on Struts. JSF has superceded Struts as the default Java EE web view technology, so it's not even considered "best" by the Java EE standard.
Stick with Spring. You won't be sorry.
I will not blame struts 2, indeed it's a great product, I work with it every day. But in my experience spring MVC is a lot simpler and clearer. This doesn't mean you don't get as much features.
Try both, and you'll see what I mean.
Tell us which one you choose!
I am looking for a good tutorial on migrating from struts to spring. I have multiple struts actions that I would like to refactor into spring components.
Here's one (assuming you're talking about Struts 1, although you don't specify).
Not sure how helpful it will be; depending on how clean the original Struts code was it could be relatively straight-forward, or brutal.
In my experience the bulk of the work lies in the JSPs, not the actions themselves, particularly if the S1 code made extensive use of the Struts tags. The actions themselves are easier to deal with because of strong IDE support.
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.