[Springframework-developer] Next release and Petclinic

[Ken K. <kk...@kk...>]

Juergen, Rod, and all:

I'm back from vacation and ready to get going on finishing up version 1 
of petclinic. I apologize again for the rough and incomplete nature of 
the documentation so far supplied.

In addition to finishing and polishing the docs, I also have in mind a 
few other changes:

1. In my ClinicJdbcDAO, I have a number of inner classes that provide 
the database queries,updates, and inserts. ClinicJdbcDAO creates 
instances of these classes, storing references to them as 
RdbmsOperations so that subclasses may substitute their own specialized 
versions (as bean properties), including StoredProcedures. A subclass 
must also override the related ClinicDAO API method. I didn't add the 
setters/getters needed for subclasses to use them. Also, the 
afterPropertiesSet method will need to be changed to only add the 
default versions for these properties that haven't been set. I will also 
move the inner classes outside to package level. This extra level of 
complexity isn't really needed for the demo but I think it shows some of 
Spring's strengths. I also wanted to show the point that the these 
objects are threadsafe, reusable items that can 
be created upfront with the SQL statements compiled only once.

2. Implement Juergen's suggestion to eliminate the separation of the 
business and persistence layers.
<juergen>Regarding the implementation: I've noticed that the Clinic 
interface duplicates ClinicDAO's methods to a large extent, and that 
ClinicImpl adds cross-referencing and caching to the entities (data 
access aspects). This isn't really proper separation between data access 
code and business logic, but of course the borders are often somewhat 
blurring. In our case, it's probably more appropriate to merge the two, 
i.e. offer just a Clinic interface, with the common logic in an 
AbstractClinic base class, and a ClinicJdbcImpl default implementation. 
IMO, the app simply isn't complex enough for separated business and data 
access layers.</juergen>

3. Miscellaneous minor refactoring and cleanup.


*My questions are :*

Should I focus my work toward a 0.9.1 release (i.e. simply completing 
the documentation) or the 1.0RC ?

If the consensus is 0.9.1, when is the target for this release ?

Do you think my item #1 above is worth doing for this demo app or would 
it be better to simplify by not showing pluggability of the 
RdbmsOperations  ?

Ken