Advanced Spring Framework
Never attend a session with "advanced" in the title if you're new to the subject matter. =]
I had read a little about Spring when I first started researching some of these J2EE technologies and frameworks back in November. It seemed like good technology that just didn't have quite enough mainstream acceptance or adoption. I'm not sure if the audience is a representative sample, but the TSS crowd seems to embrace it heartily. Rod Johnson was one of the people I have been most impressed with here, so maybe it's worth taking a closer look at his technology.
In any case, this was not the time and place to try to pick up some basics about Spring. I was lost throughout most of the presentation. However, I did pick up a couple of interesting things. First, org.springframework.test is their test framework, and apparently it's pretty darn good. I'd be curious to know if Spring Test is a competitor to or an ally of TestNG.
Another new specific Spring extension was introduced, Spring WebFlow. The concept of web flows seems very valuable. I found it interesting that the architect behind the tool said it had been originally implemented with Struts. I would have figured Spring MVC. It was developed originally for a client, so we have the comfort of knowing that the code is production-proven. WebFlow allows you to chain view presentations together into a kind of work flow. Imagine a web application that tells the users they are at step 3 of 6 for some business process. With WebFlow, you can actually model those 6 steps and define the different navigation paths around each screen. It can also reuse flows as nested within larger flows. It sounds a lot like a presentation tier VI to me.
The benefit of Spring is that it leverages auto-wiring through inversion of control. This reduces the amount of necessary configuration, however it also makes it less easy to troubleshoot. It is also less self-documenting. Overall, I think Spring is a fine platform for pure developers, but I'm not sure what the value proposition would be for J2EE development at NI. We may be better off sticking to simple, tool-supported frameworks like Struts.
I had read a little about Spring when I first started researching some of these J2EE technologies and frameworks back in November. It seemed like good technology that just didn't have quite enough mainstream acceptance or adoption. I'm not sure if the audience is a representative sample, but the TSS crowd seems to embrace it heartily. Rod Johnson was one of the people I have been most impressed with here, so maybe it's worth taking a closer look at his technology.
In any case, this was not the time and place to try to pick up some basics about Spring. I was lost throughout most of the presentation. However, I did pick up a couple of interesting things. First, org.springframework.test is their test framework, and apparently it's pretty darn good. I'd be curious to know if Spring Test is a competitor to or an ally of TestNG.
Another new specific Spring extension was introduced, Spring WebFlow. The concept of web flows seems very valuable. I found it interesting that the architect behind the tool said it had been originally implemented with Struts. I would have figured Spring MVC. It was developed originally for a client, so we have the comfort of knowing that the code is production-proven. WebFlow allows you to chain view presentations together into a kind of work flow. Imagine a web application that tells the users they are at step 3 of 6 for some business process. With WebFlow, you can actually model those 6 steps and define the different navigation paths around each screen. It can also reuse flows as nested within larger flows. It sounds a lot like a presentation tier VI to me.
The benefit of Spring is that it leverages auto-wiring through inversion of control. This reduces the amount of necessary configuration, however it also makes it less easy to troubleshoot. It is also less self-documenting. Overall, I think Spring is a fine platform for pure developers, but I'm not sure what the value proposition would be for J2EE development at NI. We may be better off sticking to simple, tool-supported frameworks like Struts.
posted by Anonymous at 4:03 PM
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