Re: [Springframework-developer] Giving up

[Colin S. <col...@ex...>]

Lars Fischer wrote:

>Hi Jürgen,
>
>you're just too smart ...
>
>My previous mail explaining the error somehow got lost in cyberspace.
>
>Still don't know what I was struggling with. It just doesn't make any sense
>(that it doesn't work) and that's why I was so frustrated.
>
>Just started everything from scratch (and I mean everything - even wrote
>a new build.xml). Before I used the tutorial as starting point.
>
>The example behaves as expected, there's only one thing I'm wondering
>about:
>
>I've change the MySQL stuff to Postgres - no problem. At this point I do
>NOT provide the database table for the example object.  The application
>starts up fine and does not tell me anything about a mapping problem.
>Is this the default behaviour ?
>
>Another question about WebWork (2). I know the difference about Spring and
>WebWork and that it's 'no problem' to combine the two frameworks. 
>But does it make any sense ? Is WebWork MVC superior ?
>IMO it does make more sense to stay with Spring alone so you don't have
>to deal with two technologies.
>  
>
For anybody that hasn't decided on a web ui tier, I would also highly 
recommend Apache's Tapestry. Tapestry is a component oriented framework 
(somewhat similar to the web layer in Apple's WebObjects), where ui 
elements are java components, and components and pages have a full 
lifecycle and remember their state, while still working efficiently in a 
web environment. I think it's significantly higher level way of doing a 
web ui than the like of Spring's mvc framework or WebWork (never mind 
Struts, a truly mediocre framework in my opinion). Since Tapestry also 
does runtime code instrumentation, there is an easy mechanism to bring 
in beans from Spring context into Tapestry pages and components in a 
declarative fashion, maintaining inversion of control.

Negatives include the fact that some of the concepts in Tapestry are 
hard to get your mind around if all you are used to is the traditional 
web ui approaches. I think it takes a good day or two to 'grok' 
tapestry. On the documentation side, there is a book by the author (to 
be published by Manning) coming out in a few months. Other than that, 
there is documentation ranging from excellent (component guide) to 
decent (usage guide) to out of date (most of the rest). There are some 
excellent examples though.

Early next week I am going to try write a document describing some best 
practices for combining Spring and Tapestry. Hopefully that will be of 
use to anybody else that wants to combine these two excellent frameworks.

Colin