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

[JP P. <jp....@ti...>]

Hi Lars,

First, thanks for feedback.

<quote>
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!)
</quote>

For time being, the tutorial is disconnected from the tutorials/Demos.
It's useful to understand basics of Spring, but to go further, the
Petclinic and Countries Demos are best suited.
Having a standard war is just a little issue due to the database bound
with the application server as this is not in the standard.
Nevertheless, we just modified the Petclinic Demo to work both with
Tomcat and JBoss. JBoss is more close to the standard way of bounding.
This is available in the CVS and in the very soon upcoming 0.9.1.
For using with WebLogic, you will have to configure the database in the
application server and modify the Ant script to include a WebLogic
specific file for bounding the application JNDI name to the real one as
the provided jboss-web.xml does for JBoss.


<quote>
- 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.
</quote>

I guess the power is not the same, but I prefer let Rod or Juergen
answer on this topic.


<quote>
- 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.
</quote>

The issue you encountered with the tutorial is mainly due as it is
out-of-dated. Mainly, the xml bean-definition file syntax has changed.
You will have to understand things like 

<bean name="Raphael" singleton="true" class="tutorial.bean.Pet">
  <property name="name">Raphael<property>
  <property name="age">6<property>
  <property name="species" beanRef="true">cat<property>
</bean>

as

<bean id="Raphael" singleton="true" class="tutorial.bean.Pet">
  <property name="name"><value>Raphael</value><property>
  <property name="age"><value>6</value><property>
  <property name="species"><ref bean="cat"/><property>
</bean>

if the "cat" bean is defined in another factory, replace "bean=" by
"external=".

We are aware that the tutorial has to grow up and be updated, but we
rely only on volunteer resources. 


<quote>- Why do I need "SpringAppController" ? Is this some base init
class ?
Mapping of model and view should be handled automatically.
</quote>

It just let you to explicit the mapping in a very modulable fashion and
has another role: defining the beans and factories, even initializing
certain of them with others. This let you work mainly with interfaces
and just decide of the implementation class in the configuration.
Remember that Spring is not just a MVC Web framework as WW or Struts,
but covers all the layers from CLIENT up to DATA passing by BUSINESS.


I hope this will help you and don't hesitate to give us a new feedback,

Regards,
Jean-Pierre

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