I was approached by one of the editors at Packt Publishing about doing a review of Spring Web Flow 2 Web Development. I obviously said yes, the title of this post *is* “Review of Spring Web Flow 2 Web Development” :) Plus, I really don’t have much experience with Spring Web Flow 2 (SWF2) and felt doing the review made perfect sense.
For those of you that appreciate my short, don’t-hold-back, opinions, I’ll start there:
Spring Web Flow 2 Web Development is both a great “getting started” book for people wanting to learn SWF2 and serves as a good high-level “getting started” with web programming using Spring / Java EE. Definitely worth the time and money.
Now my detailed review:
Again, I really liked how Spring Web Flow 2 Web Development serves as both a jump-start on SWF2 and also covers technologies outside of SWF (Spring Security, build tools, Apache Tiles, etc). The book isn’t a detailed reference manual, that leaves you feeling you still don’t know how to use the technology, but gives the right amount of walk-through examples and framework documentation.
When finished with the book you will understand how to install SWF2, how to build and use the examples. You will have numerous, feature-rich examples the authors build throughout the book. You’ll know how to use SWF2 in a request-respone Spring MVC app and also with a JSF application. You get a solid tutorial on using Apache Tiles (kind of odd in a SWF book), a very detailed explanation of Spring Security and integrating Spring Security with SWF. You also will understand how to test your flow definition and SWF application while also learning about EasyMock.
Here are my bulleted notes chapter by chapter:
ch 1:
Very short, brief intro to Spring Web Flow 2.
High level terms and definitions
ch 2 setup and example app:
install swf2
discuss the distribution
discuss the example apps and how to build from src
covers build systems (ant, mvn, ivy)
eclipse and spring ide
then a thorough example app
-flow definition
-service layer
-dao with jpa impl
ch 3
web flow documentation
detailed look at flow definition (.., scopes, states)
least favorite chapter
hard to read, not enough example tying concepts together
ch4
spring faces
starts with intro to jsf
I’m not interested in jsf
ch 5
sub flows – built on ch2 and ch3
spring javascript abstraction
oddly placed apache tiles tutorial for combining swf, spring js, and tiles
reference for web flow configuration
ch 6 testing swf apps
covers use of AbstractXmlFlowExecutionTests
short intro to EasyMock
tests subflows
ch 7
really good intro spring security
spring security and swf