Spring Live ~ Weblog

Dependency injection means giving an object its instance variables. Really. That's it.

If you're not using dependency injection in your projects, it's a good read. As far as using a framework like Spring, that's secondary to the whole concept of DI. (2006-12-21 13:10:02.0) Permalink Comments [2]

The Spring Experience 2006 - Day 3 Category: Spring Live

At the final day of The Spring Experience, I learned how to build web applications using Hijax (progressive enhancement with Ajax) and ROO (Real Oriented Objects). Both were excellent presentations - you can read my summaries by clicking on the links below:

Ben Alex's ROO implementation has some resemblence to the XT Modeling framework from the Spring Modules project. However, I think ROO relies on a lot more code-generation than XT does. Maybe they should combine forces? (2006-12-11 09:43:05.0) Permalink Comments [0]

The Spring Experience - Day 2 Category: Spring Live

Today was another great day at The Spring Experience. I attended sessions on Grails, OSGi and the future of Spring. Please see the links below for detailed summaries of these sessions.

In addition to these talks, I did my own on What's New in AppFuse 2.0 (PDF). Since most folks that attended this talk were familiar with AppFuse, I ditched my presentation and did live coding the whole time. Some folks were hesitant about the Maven 2 transition, but I fed them free beer and they seemed to be happy. The good news for those that prefer the current Ant approach is we do plan on continuing to support version 1.9.x, but it's unlikely we'll upgrade it for JDK 5.

One funny part of my presentation is when I tried to show them how well NetBeans 5.5 works with Maven (using the Mevenide2 plugin). After loading the project and pressing "play" to launch the app in Tomcat, it took over 5 minutes to build, deploy and load. Maybe NetBeans + Mevenide isn't a good solution for AppFuse 2.0 users after all. ;-) (2006-12-09 10:00:00.0) Permalink Comments [1]

The Spring Experience 2006 - Day 1 Category: Spring Live

I'm attending The Spring Experience in Hollywood, Florida this week. Here's a list of blog posts from the sessions I attended today.

I recently updated Spring Live's Chapter 13 for SWF 1.0, but Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow (by Seth Ladd, Darren Davison, Steven Devijver and Colin Yates) is much better than my 10-page example. My updated chapter is currently in tech edit, so you may have to wait another couple weeks before it's in a released version.

Cool features in Spring 2.0: The "p" namespace and JavaConfig Category: Spring Live

Rod Johnson has blogged twice on the Interface21 Team Blog in the last week. With the interesting blogs he's been posting, it's a wonder he doesn't write more. Click on the links below to learn about some cool features in Spring 2.0:

Craig Walls also has some comments on the "p" namespace and the Java configuration option. I don't know how I feel about the "p" namespace, but I'll be asking AppFuse users what they think over the next week. In addition, I'll be watching the Java configuration project closely - this might be a good way to eliminate Spring's XML in AppFuse 2.2. You might notice on the AppFuse Roadmap that we hope to eliminate the need to write XML in this release (in favor of Convention over Configuration).

As far as blogging The Spring Experience next week, I'll do it if the sessions/speakers inspire me to do so. ;-) (2006-11-28 16:44:57.0) Permalink Comments [1]

After requesting permission to use the Spring Framework for the business logic and data access layers of an application, how do you fight something like this? Spring is not an approved Framework for the ********** environment. We understand the benefits of the framework. However, we have not certified it in our environment. Additionally, we have concerns that this framework will not gain long standing traction among the J2EE community. We would like to reduce the number of frameworks used in our environment, and do not want to be left with "legacy" frameworks that have little acceptance or support as is the case with the pico container.

Spring Live Status Category: Spring Live

I updated Chapters 8 - 13 + Appendix A in July and it's been in tech and copy edit ever since. Currently, we're editing Chapters 12 and 13, so we're close to a release - hopefully sometime in December. Unfortunately, since I updated it in July, these updates don't cover Spring 2.0. Maintaining a book for 2.5 years certainly isn't easy. (2006-11-03 20:41:30.0) Permalink Comments [5]

Ten sample applications ship with the release, each demonstrating a distinct set of features. The samples are:

Phonebook - the original sample demonstrating most features (including subflows)
Sellitem - demonstrates a wizard with conditional transitions, flow execution redirects, custom text field formatting, and continuations
Flowlauncher - demonstrates all the possible ways to launch and resume flows
Itemlist - demonstrates REST-style URLs and inline flows
Shippingrate - demonstrates Spring Web Flow together with Ajax technology
NumberGuess - demonstrates stateful beans, evaluate actions, and "single key" flow execution redirects.
Birthdate - demonstrates Struts integration
Fileupload - demonstrates multipart file upload, set actions, and flash scope
Phonebook-Portlet - the phonebook sample in a Portlet environment (notice how the flow definitions do not change)
Sellitem-JSF - the sellitem sample in a JSF environment

Congratulations to everyone involved in this release - especially the new parents! We'll be celebrating this release at the Spring BOF in Keystone tonight. Follow that with an Eclipse birthday party and it should be a good night. For fellow conference attendees, I've managed to secure beer for the BOF. ;-) (2006-10-26 17:32:29.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Spring Web Flow 1.0 RC4 and Acegi Security 1.0.2 Category: Spring Live

Spring Web Flow 1.0 RC4 was released today. I talked with Keith Donald and he pointed out a nifty new feature:

Note the new flash scope (which is like the Rails concept but a little more as attributes in flash stay in scope past the redirect and *any subsequent view refreshes* *until* the next user event is signaled (e.g. "submit")... [ideal for success messages and validation errors]

Other cool features include default POST+REDIRECT+GET behavior with no special coding and simplified XML configuration thanks to Spring 2.0 and its XSD support. I'm working on a project with JSF right now, and SWF might a nice solution for simplifying some page flows. Spring Web Flow 1.0 Final is currently scheduled to be released next week. In my "example programming" with SWF, I haven't seen any issues, but AppFuse Developer Sanjiv warns that SWF doesn't support long lived Hibernate sessions.

In other news, Acegi Security 1.0.2 was released yesterday. If you're using the LogoutFilter from 1.0+, you should checkout SEC-340. Basically, the functionality of the default logout handler has changed so the session is now invalidated.

Finally, I'll close this post with a good Acegi tip. Rather than having several filter-mappings in web.xml for your Acegi filter, you can prevent certain URLs from being filtered in your Acegi context file. Just use something like /images/*=#NONE# in your filterInvocationDefinitionSource property. Read more about this feature on the Acegi developers mailing list. (2006-10-06 01:03:09.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Dear Spring community,

I'm pleased to announce that, after 5 milestone releases and 4 release candidates over the course of 9 months, Spring 2.0 has gone final today.

Note that the website is currently down because of too much load. We would appreciate if you look at it a bit later :-)

Here are the direct download links at SourceForge.

Thanks to everybody for the invaluable feedback that went into this release! Spring wouldn't be where it is today without your contributions.

FYI, we plan to do a 1.2.9 maintenance release in mid October. Furthermore, Spring 2.0.x maintenance releases are scheduled in a rhythm of 4 to 6 weeks.

Cheers,

Juergen

Modified for HTML-friendliness.

If you're looking for code-samples for Spring 2.0, there's a lot of presentations available from Spring Forward 2006. Of course, there's also Thomas and I's Spring 2.0 Kickstart project. I hope to upgrade AppFuse and Equinox to use Spring 2.0 in the next week or so. (2006-10-03 12:08:37.0) Permalink Comments [5]