Erik’s… Hmm…

Last night the Spring Dallas User Group was lucky enough to convince Keith Donald to fly up and talk to us about the Spring Web products (Spring MVC, Spring Web Flow, Spring JavaScript, and Spring Faces). A large chunk of Keith’s talk was on annotation-based Spring MVC along with the Spring JavaScript product. Both looked great! Between Keith’s talk last night and Craig Walls’ talk last month, I think I’m ready start doing all my Spring MVC development via annotations.

Of course, I’ll need to spend some time getting up-to-speed on all the convention over configuration rules that are available. Thank God, that the SpringFramework has top-notch documentation, or I wouldn’t be able to figure out all the convention rules/options. (That was one of my main mental roadblocks that kept me away until now)

Keith also spent some time last night showing off Spring Web Flow, which is a great DSL for defining stateful web flows inside a Spring MVC webapp. Keith wrapped up with a very quick demo of Spring Faces. I’m sure JSF people will find value in that product, but I’ll stay with Spring MVC.

Keith’s talk was based on the samples that go with the new Spring Web Flow 2 release.

I have to admit, I was very impressed with Ryan Breidenbach’s Spring JavaConfig talk tonight at the Spring Dallas User Group.  I don’t hide the fact that I’m a big fan of xml configuration, and very much against annotation-driven config.  However, I don’t think I have a problem with doing my bean wiring in Java.  I’ll have to sleep on it, and then look at some code and blogs tomorrow before I yeah or neah it, but I kind of liked what I saw tonight.

One of the keys behind xml config, is having a central location to see how your app is wired, and you still have that with JavaConfig.  You get stronger type safety, there is no need to cast your bean from Object, and you get built-in IDE refactoring.  Ryan did a nice job showing off a lot of advanced bean-wiring methods in JavaConfig.

If you want to learn more about Spring JavaConfig go to the source and read more at the projects homepage.

Who likes Spring MVC out there? Are you using annotation-driven Spring MVC with the 2.5 features? To me all the @RequestMapping annotations just make controller code harder to read. Call me crazy, but I’m out on annotations for doing my Spring configuration. I greatly prefer configuring my beans in common xml files that are easy to view/edit without digging through a bunch of packages / classes.

What drove me to write this post? I saw Craig Walls give a great talk on Spring MVC and Spring Security tonight at the Spring Dallas User Group. He did a good job selling the 2.5 features, but I think he did a better job selling the 2.0 mvc features. I like the idea of using ControllerClassNameHandlerMapping and InternalResourceViewResolver and getting a nice case of convention over configuration. So I guess some good conventions are better then having to go digging through source code for what my annotations are.

If you want more info, check out Craig’s presentation, which you can download from his site.

I’ll be heading to The Spring Experience tomorrow morning. I’m very excited for many reasons. One that can’t be understated, is the weather and location of TSE, Hollywood, Florida! It’s cold and wet here in Dallas this week (30s - 50s, with rain all week).

Attending this year’s TSE will make me 3 for 3! Each one has been great, and I’m sure this one will be as well. I’m very interested in the Spring WS talks, as well as catching the Grails for Spring developers talk. The Spring Security talks should be good too, considering the the big improvements they just announced. I’ll definitely make a point to here Rod Johnson speak, at least once.

What’s everyone else that’s going to TSE excited about? Am I missing something new and exciting?

Lastly, if you read this blog, and we haven’t met, make sure and introduce yourself.  I like to put faces to the people who read and comment on this blog.