[Springframework-developer] Step-by-step tutorial feedback

[Lars F. <lar...@gm...>]

First I'd like to thank all the Spring developers for their wonderful work.

As I think documentation is one of the crucial points for wide acceptance of
an Open Source solution I'll give some feedback on the step-by-step tutorial
provided by Thomas.

In the past year I've developed a larger application based on BEA WebLogic
7.0 and WebWork (1.3) for the MVC part and as Spring documentation grows, I
want to compare both solutions and maybe move to Spring at a later point.

- First of all I'd like to have a standard war created as a result of the
tutorial, not a specific Tomcat solution as I normally don't use Tomcat and I
don't want to figure out how exactly Tomcat works (time is extremely limited!)
- The whole solutiuon seems to be more complicated compared to WebWork. In
WW I have a file named actions.xml (or views.properties) and an action for
every form and that's it. Actions.xml is much simpler than
springapp-servlet.xml.
- The first two parts of the tutorial are very good and worked well. The
third seems to be written in a hurry and doesn't work at all (at least on my
system). 
- The tutorial should have more than 4 chapters, e. g. validation should
have it's own chapter and should be explained in detail.
- Why do I need "SpringAppController" ? Is this some base init class ?
Mapping of model and view should be handled automatically.

Do not understand this as some kind of bad criticism. I just want to give
feedback and help improve the project.
Documentation IS VERY GOOD, WW still doesn't have a useful tutorial !
There are more things to come where I also want to give feedback (especially
concerning  the points where I had problems with WW), but first I have to
get more experience with Spring.

Regards
Lars