Spring is Busting Out All Over
Bill Roth's Blog |
February 2, 2006 1:17 PM
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Comments (6)
Spring is coming to the now-verdant hills of San Jose. Not only has the season come to the Diablo range of mountains that borders our fair city, but the framework popularized by Interface21 and Rod Johnson is showing up in a big way as well.
Spring is being broadly used in WebLogic customer sites. As I travel around to customer sites, it seemingly comes up everywhere. I have seen it in large government agencies, financial companies, and internet companies. I have seen it used by small consultancies and the large systems integrators. To be clear, the bulk of the usage today is using Spring beans.
It is important to understand that Spring (current version 1.2) actually consists of several different pieces:
Spring Core (IoC container and DI):This is the most widely used piece. Spring Beans allow plain objects to be written and configured together by means of a XML-based configuration file.
Spring WebMVC: Spring's own Web MVC framework.
Spring ORM: This is the part of the framework that provides an abstraction layer on top of popular Object/Relational data access frameworks.
Spring DAO: Abstraction layer over JDBC and transaction (including JTA).
Spring AOP: This aspect oriented programming framework allows the Spring inversion of control container to inject crucial enterprise services like logging and security.
So how exactly is Spring being used at BEA?
- WebLogic Server: There has been a certified bundle available since September 2005. This bundle contains the entire Spring framework, best practices on Spring interoperating with WLS as well as samples which have been tested on WebLogic Server. We believe the best, fastest way to run Spring is on WebLogic Server(which should be no surprise). BEA also provides support for customers who use Spring.
- BEA Workshop: The Spring Framework can be used in Workshop today. It's all Java. In fact we certify a configuration which consists of WebLogic Server and a specific version of the framework. We will have specific tooling support for Spring beans via SpringIDE at the end of January 2006, and we'll continue to listen to customer demands for their tooling needs. When it comes to building web applications where one page flows to another, our preferred model is the Page Flow model in the application framework being developed in Beehive. We will continue to focus on providing great developer support for the programming model we delivered to the world in WebLogic 8.1. For more information and discussion on Spring and Workshop, see the Dev2Dev newsgroup for BEA Workshop
- WebLogic Portal and WebLogic Integration: WebLogic Portal is currently certifying Spring beans for use in Portal 8.1.x. This would allow you to call Spring beans from portlets taking advantage of dependency injection for example. Support for Spring MVC is under consideration for our next major release after WLP 9.2. If you would like to share your use cases with the Portal team you can do so by visiting their newsgroup page at: http://forums.bea.com/bea/forum.jspa?forumID=2044.
Developer innovation and deployment piece of mind
BEA is providing a full product offering for Spring beans today. Now, we have been talking about "Blended" development for some time -the acknowledgement that customers will choose the best technology from both open source and commercial solutions to solve their enterprise needs. Our philosophy is that if you want to use the Spring framework, go ahead, and we'll support you. Also Spring 2.0 is expected to be released at the end of March. We are working to get Spring 2.0 integration examples as soon as possible thereafter.
Some of you may notice that that there is some overlap between Spring Web MVC and "Page Flows" from the WebLogic application framework, which is currently developed in Apache as Beehive. While Spring MVC is a great technology, Page Flows is our preferred way to build web applications since it extends the proven and all-time most popular Java application framework, Apache Struts, and we'll continue to provide strong support Page Flows as a web programming model. But to be clear, if you want to use Spring MVC on WebLogic server, go ahead. This is what "Blended" development is all about: developer freedom. We'll continue to monitor what customers want and deliver support as appropriate. In fact, Spring MVC support is under consideration for our next major release post WLP 9.2
The Spring framework is strategic for BEA, for two reasons. First, there is an inexorable move by developers onto the framework. But more importantly, the Inversion of Control pattern makes life easier for developers, and our customers. And as Alfred Chuang has said on many occasions, this is our single driving goal: Making the delivery of enterprise applications easier.
See Andy Piper's blog posting on Spring here
Special thanks for Teju Adjani, Alex Toussaint, Adam Fitzgerald, Eric Hsaio and Franz Aman for help in the preparation of this post.
Comments
Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first) | Post Comment
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As you probably know there is a lot of momentum around
AJAX. Do you this trend benefiting Bea? and if so,
why?
Thanks
Posted by: agnesmuylle on February 4, 2006 at 9:56 AM
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Hey Bill
Do you think Bea's blended approach is a potential differentiation versus the competition?
i'm not a developer myself, but i'm curious to know to which extent Bea's latest Workshop release is a potential to increase its competitive advantage versus the competition?
thx
Posted by: agnesmuylle on February 4, 2006 at 10:02 AM
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Your first question is "Does AJAX benefit BEA"? I think it does. We've had AJAX in Portal for some time now, and many of our partners are working on AJAX solutions.
Do I think this offers differentiation? You bet. Seach dev2dev for our "Blended" posts and you will see how we're going to take this out to the community.
Posted by: wgroth2 on February 4, 2006 at 11:35 AM
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in spring framework i want to use hibernate support what jar file is needed to set the classpath
Posted by: csekhar143 on April 25, 2006 at 10:30 PM
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The hibernate jar file list depends on the version you want to use. If you have downloaded the hibernate core, then look into lib/_README.txt file for list of required jar files.
FYI: Following is the list of jars required for using Hibernate 3.1.2
antlr-2.7.6rc1.jar, asm.jar, asm-attrs.jar, c3p0-0.9.0.jar, cglib-2.1.3.jar, commons-collections-2.1.1.jar, commons-lang-1.0.1.jar, commons-logging-1.0.4.jar, dom4j-1.6.1.jar, ehcache-1.1.jar, hibernate3.jar, jdbc2_0-stdext.jar, and jta.jar
Posted by: ram.v on April 26, 2006 at 1:08 PM
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Hey.
Got an article that describes some of the time saving techniques with Spring MVC.
Convention Over Configuration: Spring MVC
The site itself is a free non-profit resource for java developers working on large-scale projects.
Posted by: screenedtwenty on May 30, 2007 at 8:41 PM
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