Originally Posted by
Keith Donald
To second Rod here:
Spring Web Flow (SWF) is not built on top of Spring MVC: the two framework compliment each other in a loosely coupled manner. More specifically, Spring MVC can delegate to SWF for flow execution via a thin adaption layer, and that's how it's always been designed (and will stay that way).
SWF is a pure controller framework focused primarily on solving the problem of managing stateful web conversations (dialogs) in a elegant manner, providing a self-contained flow engine based on a finite-state machine.
Spring MVC is a request-driven MVC framework positioned very much as a Struts+1, with a more complete data binding facility and more extensibility points than what's offered by Struts.
SWF fills the "C" in the MVC -- SWF is not a replacement for Spring MVC, it's a "C" compliment.
Keith