Spring in Weblogic Workshop?

[nurob]

Hi,

I'm wondering if anyone has tried to use Spring in Weblogic Workshop, which is BEA's IDE. We like some of the Struts abstraction features in the Page Flow concept, and there is now support for Hibernate as a Control, which is BEA's component model. At the same time, we'd really like to be able to plug in our own business layer and decouple the Page Flow.

From what I can see so far, this seems a messy proposition, as a lot of their implementation is hidden, and some of the functionality duplicates Spring features, notably transactions. However, BEA is open-sourcing their code (Beehive and Pollinate), and is an early implementer of new Java specifications, such as Annotations, which are heavily used here. The hidden autogen features make the RAD concept almost doable, and I assume this would be the potential direction for the future, for those who want to compete with the M$ development model.

Regards,
Rob

[stueccles]

Ive looked into weblogic workshop for a client a while back and for all its power it wouldnt work around there existing software architecture and would require a complete migration to workshop frameworks, but it looks very good for greenfield developments as long as your heavily bought into the BEA platform.

Also dont try to use it without a serious piece of desktop kit, resource starving.

But it seems very oposable to Spring, as its main aim is to remove the "plumbing" of J2EE applications, struts web flow, web services clients, destinations, JMS integrations, bussiness process flows and data integration (with liquid data) which is the main issue that Spring is trying to solve but without doing the code generation that workshop does.

but if someone makes a Spring Workshop..... id buy that for a dollar.

[nurob]

Thanks for your experience, stueccles. I think we share your concerns about the BEA buy-in, but I think with the open-source versions being developed we may be really buying in to a framework, which could potentially be ported to other platforms and Eclipse. Our current project is brand-new, by the way.

Regarding the framework issue, you also share our concerns about the "plumbing" considerations. Which leads me to ask those watching: Looking at the survey, many seem to sense this dichotomy. Of the person who answered "Yes, with Spring", did you find this a problem, and how did you resolve it? Of the rest, what about stueccles' suggestion, has there been consideration of the use of Tiger Annotations within a "Spring Workshop"?

Cheers