NFJS 2.1 - Spring MVC

So from what I'm gathering almost all of the new web application frameworks impose an MVC pattern on you, including Spring (JSF, Shale, and Tapestry too). Although I didn't attend the "Basics of Spring" presentation earlier in the conference, I wanted to see what the Spring MVC offering was going to be. Unfortunately, the speaker explained that if you were already using the MVC built into JSF or Tapestry that those are a better choice, and that the MVC in Spring is meant to be an improvement upon Struts, but doesn't compete with some of the newer ones.

Overall it was pretty interesting, although I'm not going to go into the details. Two very cool things about this tool is that it has built in view components for rendering a model in PDF or Excel formats. Another that makes me curious about some of the other tools is that you can break up the Spring config XML file into multiple files, and Spring handles it seamlessly. This would be really handy with things like Struts-config.xml or the JSF config file which seem like they could get unwieldy. I'll have to read up to see if the others can do this as well.

None of this was to suggest that Spring would be a poor choice of framework. Actually, it's quite the opposite. Spring seems to be a great framework for abstracting from your domain/persistence layer, and the speaker highly recommended Spring in this capacity, no matter which MVC framework you were dealing with.

The biggest thing to come out of this discussion was the mention of something called continuations. Not a lot of details here, but I'll have quite a bit more when I write my entry from the next session, which coincidentally talked about continuations quite a bit.