How to modularize a MVC Web Project

[wolfman22]

Hi@all!

I would like to discuss/know how to make good modularity of a MVC Web based Project (probably osgi), because there is always just one DispatcherServlet.
So there can always just be one big "WEB" Module containing all web related stuff - but sometimes it would be useful to split things (i.e. Frontend,Backend) into more modules.

Thx & hoping for an interesting discussion

--woifal

[nestoru]

I think there is "No silver bullet" in software development like Fred Brooks stated (Brooks's law) From 1975 to 1995 Fred proved his theory. In 2015 we could again come back to this discussion for the celebration of another 20 years of "No silver Bullet"

What I am trying to say is that standards come and go trying to solve issues and with a lot of promises but the reality is that they are not and will not be an ideal solution. As the real world, the software being not an exact science (having a dual behavior between art and science) has to get real and understand that there is more than just coding and standards. There is discipline.

The MVC pattern is something to be respected after understood and there is not framework that will make you magically comply with it. I keep on seeing people inventing view templating engines "to make web designers their job easier" or to "maintain separated the business logic from the presentation logic". In reality you can have a very good and clear MVC implementation using plain servlets and JSP as you can with Spring MVC and JSTL or any other rendering technology.

How you use the technology is what really matters instead of which technology you use. Spring gives you all the tools to respect the patterns and does a lot of things for you but it does not mean you cannot do it still wrong.

Maintaining separation of concerns is always a challenge that can only be controlled with code discussion/revision and discipline ... some automation looking for code anti-paterns helps, as OSGi will eventually help minimizing integration time but no tool or technology will provide the silver bullet to kill the wolf IMO.