General Availability of Spring Web Flow 2 Announced

[Keith Donald]

From the official announcement at www.springframework.org:
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Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce general availability of Spring Web Flow 2. Download | Documentation

Spring Web Flow is the project in the Spring Portfolio that focuses on the development of rich web applications. As a Spring project, Web Flow builds on the Spring Web MVC framework to provide:

• A domain-specific-language for defining reusable controller modules called flows
• An advanced controller engine for managing converational state
• First-class support for using Ajax to construct rich user interfaces
• First-class support for using JavaServerFaces with Spring

The modules of the Web Flow 2 distribution and their relationship with the Spring Framework are illustrated below:

What's in Web Flow 2

Spring Web MVC

The Spring Web MVC framework, a module of the Spring Framework distribution, provides the foundation for developing web applications with Spring using the proven ModelViewController paradigm. Each of the modules of the Web Flow distribution builds on this foundation.

Spring Web Flow

The Web Flow module is a MVC extension that allows you to define Controllers using a domain-specific-language. This language is designed to model user interactions that require several requests into the server to complete, or may be invoked from different contexts.

Spring JavaScript

Spring JavaScript is a JavaScript abstraction framework that allows you to progressively enhance a web page with behavior. The framework consists of a public JavaScript API along with an implementation that builds on the Dojo Toolkit. Spring.js aims to simplify the use of Dojo for common enterprise scenarios while retaining its full-power for advanced use cases.
Spring JavaScript can work with any server-side framework. The Web Flow 2 distribution includes convenient integration between Spring JavaScript and Spring Web MVC for processing Ajax requests.

Spring Faces

The Spring Faces module contains Spring's support for JavaServerFaces. This support allows you to use JSF as a View technology within a familiar Spring MVC and Web Flow Controller environment. With this architectural approach, you combine the benefits of the JSF UI component model with the benefits of a Web MVC architecture. Spring Faces also includes a lightweight component library built on Spring JavaScript for declaratively enabling Ajax and client-side validation behaviors in a progressive manner.

Themes of the Web Flow 2 Release

In addition to introducing the new Spring Faces and Spring Javascript modules, the Web Flow 2 release effort addresses two major themes: Integration and Simplicity.

Integration

Across each of the modules, the Web Flow 2 distribution adds a number of interesting integrations that allow you to enrich your web applications. These integrations support:

• Using Spring Security to secure your flows in a declarative manner
• Using Tiles for JSP page composition and Ajax partial-rendering
• When using JSF, using Facelets for page composition and layout
• When using JSF, using Apache Trindad and JBoss RichFaces component libraries
• Using the Dojo widget system in a progressive manner; a manner that degrades gracefully if JavaScript is not available on the client

Simplicity

The flow definition language has been simplified tremendously in Web Flow 2 while becoming more powerful overall. These simplifications include:

• An appoximate 50% overall reduction in lines-of-code when comparing a version 2 flow definition with its version 1 equivalent (example: version 2 vs version 1)
• A concise syntax for invoking actions using an Expression Language (EL), with support for both the Unified EL and OGNL
• Declarative model binding and validation, with support for convention-over-configuration
• Support for reuse at both the flow and state levels using flow definition inheritance
• Enhanced modularity, allowing a flow and its dependent resources to be packaged togeher in a self-contained bundle

Release Notes

• Web Flow 2 requires Java 1.4 or greater and runs on all major Java EE platforms including Tomcat, Jetty, Websphere, WebLogic, and JBoss.

• Web Flow 2 requires Spring Framework 2.5.4 or greater.

• Web Flow 2 has been certified by SpringSource as "Platform Ready" and is fit to run on the SpringSource Application Platform in an OSGi-enabled web application.

Getting Started

• Get started using Web Flow by downloading the release and walking through the reference applications. Suppliment with the documentation as you go to familiarize yourself with the feature set.

• To get started using a build system such as Maven or Ant+Ivy, access Web Flow artifacts from the Maven Central Repository.

• To get started using Web Flow in an OSGi environment on the SpringSource Application Platform, download the platform and get Web Flow bundles from the SpringSource Enterprise Bundle Repository.

Additional Community Resources

• Read the interview with Keith Donald and Jeremy Grelle of SpringSource describing what's new in the Web Flow 2 distribution in more detail

• Get involved with the Web Flow 2 community on the Spring Community Forums

• Explore Spring Web reference applications on-line. The Spring Travel application showcases the integrated Web Flow 2 feature set and is included in the distribution. The SpringSource Enterprise Bundle Repository is a real-world application in production built on Spring 2.5 and Spring Web Flow 2.0.

• If you are an existing Web Flow 1 user, review the migration guide to help in upgrading to Web Flow 2. The WebFlowUpgrader tool automates the conversion of your flows to the version 2 syntax

• Submit bug reports and requests for enhancement using the Web Flow issue tracker

• Watch for upcoming articles on Web Flow 2 by subscribing to springframework.org

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Thanks very much to the community of early Web Flow 2 adopters here on this forum; the feedback and community has proven absolutely essential to getting Web Flow where it is today. Enjoy!

[wwheeler]

Congratulations on the release!

[RobertGloverJr]

I appologize for asking what hopefully is an easy question to answer. I am trying to follow the simple directions (shown immediately below) to prepare the sample applications. The directions are so simple that it makes the error message I am receiving (shown at the bottom of this post) all the more frustrating. I have java 1.5 and ant 1.7 on the classpath. I get the expected response when I type "java -version" and "ant -version". The instructions said to simply type "ant", which I did as instructed. Yet, I receive the 3 incomprehensible error messages shown below.

Thank you in advance for suggestions...

# Download the Spring Web Flow release.
# Expand the release archive.
# Access the projects/build-spring-webflow directory and run ant. This will build Web Flow along with the .war files for the sample projects. The build will take a few minutes to complete since it retrieves the libraries needed to build from the SpringSource Bundle repository. Please note that ant 1.7 and Java 5 are required to build.

C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\build-spring-webflow>ant
Buildfile: build.xml

clean:
[subant] Entering directory: C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-binding

clean:
[subant] Leaving directory: C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-binding
[subant] Entering directory: C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-js

clean:
[subant] Leaving directory: C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-js
[subant] Entering directory: C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-webflow

clean:
[subant] Leaving directory: C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-webflow
[subant] Entering directory: C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-faces

clean:
[subant] Leaving directory: C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-faces
[subant] Entering directory: C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-webflow-samples\booking-faces
Trying to override old definition of task dist-jar

clean:
[subant] Leaving directory: C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-webflow-samples\booking-faces
[subant] Entering directory: C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-webflow-samples\booking-mvc
Trying to override old definition of task dist-jar

clean:
[subant] Leaving directory: C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-webflow-samples\booking-mvc

clean-integration:

jar:
[subant] Entering directory: C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-binding

ivy.init:

resolve.init:

resolve.compile:
[subant] Leaving directory: C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-binding

BUILD FAILED
C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-build\multi-bundle\artifact.xml:45: The following error occurred while executing this line:
C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-build\multi-bundle\common.xml:70: The following error occurred while executing this line:
C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-build\common\common.xml:80: ivy:cachepath doesn't support the "log" attribute

Total time: 1 second
C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\build-spring-webflow>

[Keith Donald]

Do you have an old version of ivy in your system path or ant lib path that is getting picked up instead of the version included in the distribution?

[RobertGloverJr]

Thank you... Your suggestion in conjunction with this post: http://forum.springframework.org/sho...d.php?p=176131
solved the problem. A few months ago when I was reading Erwin Vervaet's book "Working with Spring Web Flow" I had installed IVY beta 1 inside my ant 1.7.0 directory. That was the problem. The SWF ant build apparantly won't work if IVY beta 1 is accessible. I removed IVY beta 1 and the SWF ant build got past that problem but encountered a new problem:

[ivy:cachepath] May 27, 2008 4:38:18 PM org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodDirector executeWithRetry
[ivy:cachepath] INFO: I/O exception (java.net.ConnectException) caught when processing request: Connection timed out: connect
[ivy:cachepath] May 27, 2008 4:38:18 PM org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodDirector executeWithRetry
[ivy:cachepath] INFO: Retrying request

The new problem was discussed by someone else in this post: http://forum.springframework.org/showthread.php?t=54603

Like the person who posted ealier, quote,

yes, I tried to set ANT_OPTS but this failed miserably

(I too am behind a firewall).

The other poster had to jump hoops unjarring, modifying, and then re-jarring jets3t.jar. Surely there is an easier way?

Thank you in advance...

[RobertGloverJr]

I bit the bullet and did it the hard way by creating a new jets3t.properties file and inserting it into this jar file:

C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-build\lib\ivy\jets3t.jar

The contents of the new jets3t.properties was:

httpclient.proxy-autodetect=false
httpclient.proxy-host=secret.secret.org
httpclient.proxy-port=8080

Well, that got me past the problem. (Incidentally, here is a link explaining jets3t.properites: http://jets3t.s3.amazonaws.com/toolk...iguration.html )

Now however there is another problem. This problem is that the ant build gives these error messages:

...snip...
[ivy:cachepath] s3://repository.springsource.com/ivy/libraries/external/org.ognl/com.springsource.org.ognl/2.6.9/ivy-2.6.9.xml
[ivy:cachepath] module not found: javax.el#com.springsource.javax.el;2.1.0
[ivy:cachepath] ==== integration: tried
[ivy:cachepath] C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-binding/../integration-repo/javax.el/com.springsource.javax.el/2.1.0/ivy-2.1.0.xml
[ivy:cachepath] -- artifact javax.el#com.springsource.javax.el;2.1.0!com.sprin gsource.javax.el.jar:
[ivy:cachepath] C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-binding/../integration-repo/javax.el/com.springsource.javax.el/2.1.0/com.springsource.javax.el-2.1.0.jar
[ivy:cachepath] ==== bundle-external-repository: tried
[ivy:cachepath] s3://repository.springsource.com/ivy/bundles/external/javax.el/com.springsource.javax.el/2.1.0/ivy-2.1.0.xml
[ivy:cachepath] ==== library-external-repository: tried
[ivy:cachepath] s3://repository.springsource.com/ivy/libraries/external/javax.el/com.springsource.javax.el/2.1.0/ivy-2.1.0.xml
[ivy:cachepath] ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
[ivy:cachepath] :: UNRESOLVED DEPENDENCIES ::
[ivy:cachepath] ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
[ivy:cachepath] :: org.apache.commons#com.springsource.org.apache.com mons.logging;1.1.1: not found
[ivy:cachepath] :: org.springframework#org.springframework.beans;2.5. 4.A: not found
[ivy:cachepath] :: org.springframework#org.springframework.context;2. 5.4.A: not found
[ivy:cachepath] :: org.springframework#org.springframework.core;2.5.4 .A: not found
[ivy:cachepath] :: org.ognl#com.springsource.org.ognl;2.6.9: not found
[ivy:cachepath] :: javax.el#com.springsource.javax.el;2.1.0: not found
[ivy:cachepath] ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

I could not find any help googling this.

Suggestions appreciated.
Thanks in advance....

[Keith Donald]

Well, what an adventure you are having building the code...

I've pointed the Spring Build team at this thread - I hope we can come up with a better solution for those behind proxies like you in then next maintenance revision of Web Flow.

As for your last error, that one is puzzling. Perhaps the repository was just not accessible at the time you built? I'd try cleaning and rebuilding - I wouldn't expect that error to occur consistently unless something got corrupted with the build configuration (which is unlikely). You might also want to consider clearing out the ivy-cache and integration-repo directories that get created within projects to be on the safe side.

Keith

[RobertGloverJr]

Thanks for the encouragement. I went home and did a fresh install of everything from scratch. The build went perfectly without any problems. It took 7 minutes. Note at home there is no firewall.
However, back at work I entirely deleted

"C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE"

and recreated it from scratch by un-zipping

spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE.zip

and re-inserting property file jets3t.properties into

C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-build\lib\ivy\jets3t.jar

Alas however, the exact same problem occured:

clean-integration:

jar:
[subant] Entering directory: C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-binding

ivy.init:
[ivy:settings] :: Ivy 2.0.0-beta2 - 20080225093827 :: http://ant.apache.org/ivy/ ::
[ivy:settings] :: loading settings :: file = C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-build\common\ivysettings.xml

resolve.init:

resolve.compile:
[ivy:cachepath] May 28, 2008 10:34:47 AM org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodBase readResponseBody
[ivy:cachepath] INFO: Response content length is not known
[ivy:cachepath] May 28, 2008 10:34:48 AM org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodDirector executeWithRetry
[ivy:cachepath] INFO: I/O exception (javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException) caught when processing request: Remote host closed connection during handshake
[ivy:cachepath] May 28, 2008 10:34:48 AM org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodDirector executeWithRetry
[ivy:cachepath] INFO: Retrying request
[ivy:cachepath] May 28, 2008 10:34:48 AM org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodBase readResponseBody
[ivy:cachepath] INFO: Response content length is not known
[ivy:cachepath] May 28, 2008 10:34:48 AM org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodDirector executeWithRetry
[ivy:cachepath] INFO: I/O exception (javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException) caught when processing request: Remote host closed connection during handshake
[ivy:cachepath] May 28, 2008 10:34:48 AM org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodDirector executeWithRetry
[ivy:cachepath] INFO: Retrying request

(...snip...)

[ivy:cachepath] C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-binding/../integration-repo/javax.el/com.springsource.javax.el/2.1.0/ivy-2.1.0.xml
[ivy:cachepath] -- artifact javax.el#com.springsource.javax.el;2.1.0!com.sprin gsource.javax.el.jar:
[ivy:cachepath] C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-binding/../integration-repo/javax.el/com.springsource.javax.el/2.1.0/com.springsource.javax.el-2.1.0.jar
[ivy:cachepath] ==== bundle-external-repository: tried
[ivy:cachepath] s3://repository.springsource.com/ivy/bundles/external/javax.el/com.springsource.javax.el/2.1.0/ivy-2.1.0.xml
[ivy:cachepath] ==== library-external-repository: tried
[ivy:cachepath] s3://repository.springsource.com/ivy/libraries/external/javax.el/com.springsource.javax.el/2.1.0/ivy-2.1.0.xml
[ivy:cachepath] ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
[ivy:cachepath] :: UNRESOLVED DEPENDENCIES ::
[ivy:cachepath] ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
[ivy:cachepath] :: org.apache.commons#com.springsource.org.apache.com mons.logging;1.1.1: not found
[ivy:cachepath] :: org.springframework#org.springframework.beans;2.5. 4.A: not found
[ivy:cachepath] :: org.springframework#org.springframework.context;2. 5.4.A: not found
[ivy:cachepath] :: org.springframework#org.springframework.core;2.5.4 .A: not found
[ivy:cachepath] :: org.ognl#com.springsource.org.ognl;2.6.9: not found
[ivy:cachepath] :: javax.el#com.springsource.javax.el;2.1.0: not found
[ivy:cachepath] ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
[ivy:cachepath]
[ivy:cachepath]
[ivy:cachepath] :: USE VERBOSE OR DEBUG MESSAGE LEVEL FOR MORE DETAILS
[subant] Leaving directory: C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-binding

BUILD FAILED
C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-build\multi-bundle\artifact.xml:45: The following error occurred while executing this line:
C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-build\multi-bundle\common.xml:70: The following error occurred while executing this line:
C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\spring-build\common\common.xml:80: impossible to resolve dependencies:
resolve failed - see output for details

Total time: 17 seconds
C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\build-spring-webflow>

[Ben Hale]

Robert, I've updated Spring Build and Spring Web Flow to make it a bit easier to configure the jets3t properties in the next release (or in SVN now). To do this, there will now be a jets3t.properties in /spring-build/lib/ivy to modify. If you want to check out the source code and give this I try, I'd love to know if it works.

As for your latest problem, I'm not quite sure what's going on there. Are you able to ping repository.springsource.com? And if so, what host does it resolve to?

[RobertGloverJr]

Thanks for the quick response. I'd love to check out the source from SVN and try now, but I can't allocate the time at work to do that.

When I ping from a DOS prompt at work (with a firewall) the response is:

C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\build-spring-webflow>ping repository.springsource.com

Pinging s3-2-w.amazonaws.com [207.171.181.229] with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 207.171.181.229:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

C:\JavaLibs\spring-webflow-2.0.1.RELEASE\projects\build-spring-webflow>

Forgive my newbie question, but is there any way to bypass ant/IVY and simply download as a zip file the WebFlow sample apps in the state they would be in if the ant build were completing okay?