first of all: that might be a newbie question. However after few searches I cannot find anything that would bring me further.
Basically what would be the reasons to choose an app server over a Spring framework to develop a medium complex web application? I am fairly new to Spring, did some hard core WebSphere for few years. While reading about Spring I see that it comes with a good bunch of features (transactions, persistence, messaging, connectors etc). Is Spring hard to scale or manage in a clustered environment?
Any comments welcome.
Thanks
Spring is awesome.
Your terminology is way off though. Spring is a Framework. It's a library that you use to write a web application.
An app Server is what your application runs in. You need both. For example, use the Spring Framework to create an app that runs in the Tomcat app server.
EAR files aren't a requirement for doing Java EE development.
It's not either/or: if you deploy a Java EE application you need a container of some kind.
I've deployed Spring apps on Tomcat and WebLogic. I think WebLogic is the best Java EE app server on the market. My decision about whether to deploy to it or not would be based strictly on availability.
You've seen that Spring has their own Java EE container now. It forks Tomcat and marries it with OSGi and Spring. I haven't tried it yet, but if the quality is similar to their framework it will be very promising indeed.
Are you really asking "When would I write an application using Spring? When should I choose EJB3?"
My preference these days is Spring. I can do persistence, transactions, messaging, web services, and everything else I need.
Bpapa,
you got me there, yes the terminology is wrong. I meant Spring + web container vs. App Servers. Surely the web app has to be deployed somewhere. I guess that shifts the question to the server side features as per my first post.
Topology example: Spring + Tomcat vs. WebSphere.
As a side note: people argue if Tomcat is an app server, many consider it rather a web container. You could not deploy an EAR file to Tomcat, can you? All it takes is a WAR, am I right? But that gets too academic.
Thanks a lot
Rod Johnson's "Expert 1:1 Java EE Development Without EJBs" is the basis for Spring. It's an excellent book, but I'd say it's a bit out of date now. The book was written with EJB2 in mind. It was published before Spring became an open source project. The framework is up to version 3.0 now, so I'd say that the book is of historical interest only. I'd recommend a more modern take on the question that takes Spring 3.0 and EJB3 into account.
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I've got the basic idea of, what both of them are and when they can be used. I've already referred to this question as well. As of now what I understood was:
Spring Boot bundles a war file with server runtime like Tomcat. This allows easy distribution and deployment of web applications. As the industry is moving towards container based deployments, Spring Boot is useful in this context.
Spring MVC is a traditional web application framework that helps you to build web applications.
What I wanted to know is that, what can be the best practice when it comes to web applications and the differences of using either one of them in depth. Any help would be appreciated.
Spring boot is great - we have an app that runs standalone fine, using JAXRS 2, JSF 2.1.6. They versions are irrelevant really, other than they are under our control.
Our corporate deployments are on fully blown Java EE app servers though, so we don't have the option of deploying the app to something simple such as Tomcat or even as a jar with embedded Tomcat.
Trying to get a Spring boot app to work on these ends up being a world of pain, as the Java EE app server will either stop you completely or partially from using different versions of jars to the ones it ships with.
So my question is, is there a magic bullet that allows Spring boot apps to fully blown app servers like WildFly,Glassfish etc. Or what are the general approaches to getting around this issue?
The only one I can think of is to code the application to exactly the same spec as the app server, and then use Maven profiles to ship the jars for the embedded up, but to have them as provided when using them in an app server. Of course this immediately takes away the advantage of Spring not being tied down to a particular version of Java EE.
As we all know that we rarely get a chance to learn whats out there in the enterprise world when it comes to college. In my experience I have always seen people learning Core Java and may be some other languages and when they graduate they have no Idea about this enterprise jargon. I am in that boat now. I am a recent graduate with a programming job and I often get confused about all the jargon which appear in the news an discussions. I believe all the frameworks mentioned have a purpose at the time of creation which is intended to fill a void.
I am sure that many of you would have gone through this in the early stage of your career. Is there anything out there a blog post, book , video or forum discussion which helped you to understand how all these frameworks weave together to form a application.
A detailed article would be most appreciated. I tried to look for one but I could them in bits and pieces but not a comprehensive article.
You could google/wikipedia them 1 by 1.
From wikipedia
Java EE
"Java Platform, Enterprise Edition or Java EE is a widely used platform for server programming in the Java programming language. The Java platform (Enterprise Edition) differs from the Java Standard Edition Platform (Java SE) in that it adds libraries which provide functionality to deploy fault-tolerant, distributed, multi-tier Java software, based largely on modular components running on an application server."
The Spring framework is sort of an alternative to Java EE.
Spring
Struts
"Apache Struts is an open-source web application framework for developing Java EE web applications. It uses and extends the Java Servlet API to encourage developers to adopt a model-view-controller (MVC) architecture. It was originally created by Craig McClanahan and donated to the Apache Foundation in May, 2000. Formerly located under the Apache Jakarta Project and known as Jakarta Struts, it became a top level Apache project in 2005."
and so on. Research at your liesure...
You don't need all of these frameworks for completing your application. Even though many frameworks provide integration and support for each other, you don't have to use them all. I suggest you go layer by layer. Spring has uses in almost all layers, Struts is mostly an MVC framework. Spring MVC (one part of Spring) and Struts fill the same void. Tiles is a view layer framework. I think FreeMarker, Velocity and Tapestry are also view layer frameworks. JBOSS is an application server.
Spring and EJB 2.x were competitors. Again, EJB is meant for some of the more complicated applications, find more on this from the creator of Spring who wrote an entire book on why EJBs are not suitable for all web applications, which laid the basis for what was to become Spring later on. Though now, the latest EJB version 3.x seems to be getting good reviews. You haven't even mentioned Hibernate and iBatis for the ORM needs of your web-app.
I suggest you get used to the plethora of frameworks in the enterprise java world. If anything, it shows that the java world is alive and active.
I am thinking about a platform for study application (it is team work). I mean standard Java EE 5 (or maybe try raw Java EE 6) and Spring. What is your choose? (I don't mean Spring MVC but Spring Beans and EJB 3.0)
Also I would like to know what app server you use? (now I use GlassFish v2)
I would recommend Spring without EJBs.
My favorite choice of Java EE app server is WebLogic, but I don't know if Oracle is as generous as BEA was about making it available to developers.
I'd recommend using Tomcat as your app server. If you need JMS, add ActiveMQ.
As duffymo says, look at Spring without EJBs. Spring is very powerful, regardless of how much/little you use. I don't know of anyone using EJBs now. Having said that, EJBs have changed dramatically over the years, and now resemble ORMs such as Hibernate (which is worth checking out in itself).
For app servers, check out JBoss. It's free/open-source, and you can choose the web component between Tomcat and Jetty. It's JMX backbone allows you to easily monitor its state and to integrate your own JMX beans into that backbone (if you're using Spring, you can JMX-enable any bean with a simple configuration).
If you want Java EE 6 then the choice appears to be either Glassfish 3 or the beta of JBoss 6. As some of the others have said, I also prefer Spring to Java EE's EJBs.
I don't see much point in looking at Java EE 5, unless you think you will be working with it in the future (possible as some companies are conservative in using newer versions of technology).
I would really like to use SpringSource dm Server, but our customer requires us to run our apps on their application server (Websphere). Is there a way to integrate SpringSource dm Server with other application servers? At least dm Server is build on OSGi, and many other application servers (including Websphere) are based on OSGi as well. Is it possible to run a SpringSource dm Server as a websphere component?
SpringSource dm Server is based on the Eclipse Equinox OSGi framework (and should not be confused with the Spring DM technology, included in dm Server, which can run on Equinox, Apache Felix, and Knopflerfish).
However, embedding dm Server in another application server, such as WebSphere Application Server, based on Equinox would be a non-trivial piece of work. It would be necessary to get both products to use the same version of Equinox, which they currently do not, then modify dm Server to support embedding in the server (e.g. to integrate with the host server's application invocation mechanism, thread pools, and class loading scheme).
If you think this support is important, please raise a requirement (which requires a simple registration) against dm Server.
Spring DM is deployed on a Knoplerfish OSGi implementation.
Websphere is deployed on an Equinox OSGi implmentation.
So the question becomes - are the two interchangeable? They both support R4, so I would say, yes, they are.
The next question would be to check dependencies, particularly with respect to things like HttpServices.
I would say this would be ok, but I think the final proof would be try deploying it. Easiest would be to drop the bundles into a Websphere deployment. You'll need your bundles and whatever spring bundles you're using.
I'm also interested in this topic. Another way of looking at this problem is that you want an application depoyable in both Spring dm server and a traditional app server (Websphere, weblogic, JBoss, ...).
The OSGi containers are embeddable inside non-OSGi applications, so it is theoretically possible to deploy an app to both Spring dm server and the same app + OSGi container to a traditional app server.
Now, as usual, the devil's in the details, including such topics of web development and bridging servlets between the outer app server and the OSGi container.
I do not think that this is really the case ...
see the following link for this: http://apsblog.burtongroup.com/2008/11/websphere-7-osgi.html
But it seems on the other side, that the trend is clear ... there will be a time when OSGI based application can be deployed on Java EE application servers