JSR-168 + JSF + Spring + Hibernate

[bostone]

Hi Spring gurus,

I'm currently doing R&D for next generation of large and famous US company internal employee portal. I was hired one year ago to lead conversion from ASP/VB homegrown portal to J2EE based. The company is an IBM shop so the app/portal servers currently are WAS5.0.2.6/WPS5.0.2.2. We managed to do a decent job of reimplementing most of the portlets using JSR-168 API and WSRP.
Currently I'm testing new WebSphere Portal Server 5.1. beta and would like to try the combo I put into the title of this message. I'm totaly new to the Spring framework, I'm fairily familiar with Hibernate and I've worked for last 6 months with JSF and JSR-168. I do have code and article from JavaWorld (JSF + Spring + Hibernate) but I have to take it even further - to use it with WebSphere Portal and JSR-168 API.
So, the main question is should I even try? Is your product suitable for this, and if yes, is there any docs that may help along the lines?
If any of you, core guys are interested in collaboration, please drop me a personal message I'll reply with my email address and phone number.

Regards,

Rob Stone

[bostone]

Not a single comment? [I'm not from M$ :)]

[Juergen Hoeller]

As far as I can see, there should be nothing stopping you from such a combo.

Essentially, your web tier will be driven by JSF within portlets here, without Spring being involved. You'll just hook a Spring VariableResolver into JSF here, to be able to resolve JSF variable names as bean names in a Spring middle tier (like in traditional JSF).

From the point of view of the middle tier, it should be pretty much like a standard web application: one root web application context loaded by ContextLoaderListener, with portlets being able to access the beans defined in there (just like servlets would in a traditional web app).

Hibernate will just be used within the middle tier, through Spring's Hibernate support. That's standard usage, which won't be different from a traditional web app or a standalone application. That's the benefit of Spring's middle tier support being environment-agnostic :-)

Juergen

[bostone]

Thanks Juergen. As for a newbie would you advise me to go with 1.1 built-in JSF support or jsf-spring?