Coming from Struts looking for better experience

[antonypaul]

Hi all,
I am entirely new to Spring. I am a web developer currently working with Struts based applications. I am looking more help from the framework in writing application. Struts is of no use in writing business logic and model layer. I will better use a framework than writing my own implementation for the utilities that I expect from a framework.
I also looked at Apache Beehive. It looks to be the future framework with web services and SOA but requires JDK 5 and there is no chance of companies adopting this in the near future. Both JDK and Beehive need to be tested.
Before starting on learning Spring I have a question on Presentation layer technology to be used. Whether I have to stick with Struts or use Spring or JSF ?. What you people use thier in REAL applications ?. I am not asking about demo applications - not a simple CRUD application.

rgds
Antony Paul

[davison]

Before starting on learning Spring I have a question on Presentation layer technology to be used. Whether I have to stick with Struts or use Spring or JSF ?. What you people use thier in REAL applications ?. I am not asking about demo applications - not a simple CRUD application.

If you're porting an existing app, you can keep Struts as your MVC implementation. Spring offers good integration here. The JPetStore demo in the download has both a Struts and a SpringMVC frontend that you can switch in and out very easily and should give you a good starting point for comparison.

We are using Spring, including SpringMVC, in a global Intranet application for a (very) large investment bank. Parts of this application have been in production for almost a year now and we're extremely happy with it's flexibility and performance. Also see http://www.springframework.com/users.html

Regards.

[karaznie]

Hi all,
I am entirely new to Spring. I am a web developer currently working with Struts based applications. I am looking more help from the framework in writing application. Struts is of no use in writing business logic and model layer. I will better use a framework than writing my own implementation for the utilities that I expect from a framework.

[...]

Before starting on learning Spring I have a question on Presentation layer technology to be used. Whether I have to stick with Struts or use Spring or JSF ?. What you people use thier in REAL applications ?. I am not asking about demo applications - not a simple CRUD application.

I'm a long-time struts user. Few months ago I had a little spare taime to check spring MVC. I must say I used spring before but only with spring struts integration.

At first sight spring looks like a little bit more complicated fremework. It is mainly because lack of in-depth documentation regarding spring-mvc - when compared to struts documentation.

I spent few days looking around what happens inside spring MVC. I read documentation (must say - I understand it only partially:)))). I looked into sample applications I read Matt's Raible blog (he is author of Spring Live) forums - and finally decided to try. Well, must say that beginings were though :). I used to use a little bit more convenient struts tags. I was surprised that there in spring is only spring:bind. I read about varius Controllers and was a bit confused when to use FormController, when to use CommandController etc.

I like very much lack of ActionForms. Finally You can use pure POJO beans as Your form beans. NO more DTO and maintenace nightmare everytime You decided to change domain model. When I understood flow of SimpleFormController I liked spring MVC even more.

Currently I think spring MVC is my favourite MVC framework. I tried WW/WW2 and (ofcourse) struts - but in terms of maintenance and (well - might be strange a bit after I wrote above - but that's true!) simplicity spring MVC wins. It has a lot little bit nice thing I missed in other frameworks.

I use it for my new quite big project within my company and found it very convinient.

Artur