Raible Designs

Tuesday January 20, 2004

AppFuse vs. Spring I received an interesting e-mail this morning. The writer said his team is comparing AppFuse and Spring in terms of kick starting a project. This struck me as odd, especially since these two applications are quite different. Here's my response:

I think AppFuse and Spring are two completely different animals. IMO, Spring is excellent for wiring components together (i.e. Interfaces and Implementations) as well as simplifying J2EE's APIs. Of course, it has its own web framework too, but it also integrates nicely with Struts, WebWork and Tapestry. AppFuse is designed to be an application that helps you get *up and running* with your J2EE web application in the minimal amount of time. Its power is in the directory structure, Ant integration (build.xml) and testability. Also, XDoclet is heavily leveraged for code generation and maximizing developer's productivity. In essence, it's really just a packaging of other open source projects, including: Ant, XDoclet, Hibernate, JUnit, Cactus, StrutsTestCase, Canoo's WebTest, Struts Menu, Display Tag Library, JSTL and Struts (including Validator and Tiles). But rather than just packaging these together, it's also got Security and User Management built-in and contains tutorials on how to develop and test the different layers.

Here are some links on integrating Spring with other Java-based web frameworks:

Struts: http://struts.sourceforge.net/struts-spring/
WebWork: http://wiki.opensymphony.com/space/Spring+Framework+Integration
Tapestry: http://www.springframework.org/docs/integration/tapestry.html

And here are a couple of good simple descriptions of Spring:

http://test.javaranch.com/wiki/view?SpringFramework
http://barracudamvc.org/lists/archives/barracuda/2003-December/007156.html

I do plan on integrating Spring into AppFuse in the next release - so it might be awhile until I release 1.4. I basically plan on using it to wire my Managers together, as well as my DAOs. Currently, I don't think I'll use its web framework, but who knows. In the latter half of this year, I hope to add support for WebWork and Tapestry as web frameworks.

Posted in Java at Jan 20 2004, 06:05:11 AM MST 2 Comments

Struts' MappingDispatchAction I stumbed upon Struts' MappingDispatchAction this morning. It's basically the same thing as the LookupDispatchAction (which I use as my BaseAction in AppFuse), but you specify the method name in the action-mapping - rather than with request parameters (i.e. ?action=methodName). At first, this would seems tedious, but I usually end up creating a lot of action-mappings for a single action anyway, so this might be the way to go. There's really no need to change this in AppFuse now, but it is available in AppFuse's struts.jar (nightly from Dec 2, 2003).

In other news, the Open Source book is humming right along. I've finished the Hibernate, WebWork and Sitemesh chapters. I like what I see. IMO, this book is excellent for Hibernate, WebWork and Sitemesh newbies like me. Posted in Java at Jan 20 2004, 05:38:43 AM MST 2 Comments