Is Spring my Answer?

[gondor]

My company has a massive product (all java) runs within JBoss. The client to our application is a Fat client (SWING) which accesses data via a RuleEngine to our application server.

Our objects/beans have been around for about 10 years now (some newer EJB most older since our product is old). We do not use hibernate but our own in house hibernate like solution.

My questions.. I want to take initiative and build a Webclient for our app. Although I could run it locally on the appserver I want a solution that can deployed on any tomcat server and just point to our central appserver for easy of scalability, etc.

I thought about using HttpInvoker but honestly, I'd rather have the complex beans from our app server transformed into something more simple if possible so I dont need to worry about anything but standard types.

Can Spring help me architect in a webclient version in such an older/complex architecture?

Should I use it to somehow transform beans to simpler types and expose web services which the web client can use to access data OR use HttpInvoker?

Any guidance or ideas would be great. I haven't looked at frameworks in Java for a year or so and realize i've missed a lot of great frameworks.. just not sure what would be best in my design

[amin]

Have you looked at Spring Integration? It might be worth have a read and see if it fits your requirements.

[constv]

It is also important to understand the fact that Spring is not intrusive. This means that you can use all of it, or some of it. Often, individual Spring features (or just utilities) may be used on a project that is not completely Spring-based. Of course, to get the most out of Spring, you'd want to have your whole project to be managed by the Spring container and wired via dependency injection. If your project is modular (which I understand might not be the case) it might be possible to split it into independent sub-systems some of which may be managed by Spring, and some not. But, at the very least, you can use at least some Spring features and utilities from which any project can benefit.

[Mariam]

I think spring is the best answer