Spring Framework… not only for web apps
When I was looking at alternative frameworks for a project I have in my head, I looked at the obvious ones: Struts and JSF. I decided on JSF because as it comes from Sun, it is more likely that it will become the standard in the near future. However, I knew about the Spring Framework and I must confess that I thought “oh, another web framework…” and only gave it a customary glance.
But in the last week I’ve been reading the book Spring in Action, and I have to admit, the whole concept of dependency injection is pretty cool. And I’ve realized that Spring’s web support is only a tiny bit of what the Framework offers. I like the integration with ORM tools like Hibernate, or the fact that you have several distribution options for Spring, etc.
Hopefully I’ll use it more during the couple of weeks.
Craig Walls
I’m glad that you caught on. While Spring has a very nice Web MVC framework (and soon a very nice Portlet MVC framework), you don’t have to use those if you don’t want. In fact, Spring’s web framework is actually just another framework that happens to be built on top of the core Spring framework.
Choosing JSF is not a bad choice (not my favorite, but still not bad). The good news is that you can still use JSF with Spring, letting Spring manage your JSF managed beans or at least letting JSF inject beans from Spring into your JSF managed beans.
JavaGeek
Yeah. It seems most people wrongly assume that Spring is just another web framework (me included).
Great book, btw. I’m in chapter 4 so far, but the examples are very clear and the information very easy to digest.
Marc Logemann
Regarding the book, i have all Spring books around and this book by Craig is ok. But the goto-guy here is the one from Rob by Apress. But nevertheless it was also fun to read, my only concerns was that this book is just too thin to explain Spring in a descent way and that there was a fundamental error in the JDO section (mentioned that in the Spring maillist some months ago). But this book also pushed Spring into the public eyes because Manning is quite a big publisher. So in any way a great effort and i am looking forward to see more stuff from the Spring-Portlet project, some days ago i looked into the API.