JavaGeek.org - spring tag

WSAD doesn't suck so much after all

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 14:56:05 GMT

The last couple of weeks have been very interesting, as I was in the last stages of a project at work. I no longer hate WSAD (Websphere Studio Application Developer) so much. I still find a lot of missing features from the latest Eclipse releases (WSAD is based on Eclipse 2.x), but I found the integration with Websphere to be very nice, and developing EJBs is almost easy.

However, the more I use EJBs, the less I like them. After using Spring to create POJO-like services, EJBs feel too cumbersome, not to mention that we mostly do Stateless Session Beans and never even touch Entity Beans, as they impact performance too much. So, there's really not much sense in using EJBs.

One of the main things I don't like about EJBs is that they're not easy to test. With Spring, I could easilly do testing, and not only unit testing but also Integration testing, using Spring's AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests, which allows me to insert and update the database and rollback those changes afterwards, so the db isn't affected. With EJBs, so far I've only found Cactus, and I still feel a little vague on how to exactly use it, since EJBs are required to run inside an Appserver.

Anyway, I was able to finish the project, and WSAD helped.

Unit Testing with Mock Objects (and Spring)

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 14:56:59 GMT

I was looking into some information on how to do unit testing using mock objects. Since I'm using Spring, I'm also considering this into the equation.

So far, I have found some nice articles, like this one linked from TheServerSide, which talks about unit testing and mock objects in general, and provide some examples.

I have also found several mock object libraries:

EasyMock
DynaMock
jMock (It's actually DynaMock redone)

I'm wondering what people have done in this area. It seems that using mock objects is an ideal match for unit testing, and something that should be more thoroughly integrated.

Accessing a Spring bean from a servlet

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 23:01:38 GMT

I'm using Ajaxtags to implement an ajax-enabled form with dynamic dropdown fields. In order to access my DAO object (which is a Spring managed bean) to get the dropdown options, I had to have access to the Application context from a regular Servlet.

The solution is very simple, but since I had some troubles finding it, I'm adding it here for future reference, and for anyone who's looking for the same. Basically, you use the WebApplicationContextUtils object from the spring framework to get a reference to your bean. Inside the doGet() method I have:

ApplicationContext context = WebApplicationContextUtils.getWebApplicationContext(getServletContext());
Object myDao = context.getBean("daoBeanName");

It's that easy... really.