I am looking to learn Web Development with Spring 3.x and also looking at integrating hibernate into it. What is the best resource for learning Web Development with Spring MVC and Hibernate? I am new to this, so would like some resource that takes me from the ground up. Also recommend the best IDE for this.
Kind Regards
Spring in Action is a good book to get started: http://www.amazon.com/Spring-Action-Craig-Walls/dp/1935182358
It covers MVC and Hibernate in short and concise chapters to give you a quick start. For IDEs, I would recommend Eclipse with the Spring IDE plugin installed.
Hope that helps!
It depends a little bit on what you mean by " I am new to this". New to web development in general? ... new to java in general or just new to Spring and Hibernate? Spring Roo might be a great tool in general, but in terms of learning you're better off rolling as much as possible by hand. At least in the beginning. That's because it will take you to places where you WILL learn. Things will break, produce weird results, etc., all in all you'll get to know how everything jells. Hibernate in and of by itself can be an adventure. So for starters I'd forego the convenience of Roo and get your hands really really dirty.
I'd vote for starting a project and come back for more when you get stuck.
Start a project with spring ROO, it will setup all the best practices for you.
Also, use spring STS IDE, it comes with a few eclipse plugins already installed.
Related
I last installed Spring a few years ago and back then it was just some jars I had to add. Now after I googled for Spring, it brought me to SpringSource, a division of VMWare.
It took me through a whole installation process for the SpringSource Tool Suite and it looks cool, but is also bulky.
What are people doing for a robust and lightweight Java MVC framework these days?
Well, Spring MVC is a robust and lightweight Java MVC framework these days ;-)
One "problem", though: it uses Spring itself (of course), which has gotten much bigger over the years. What was once just a dependency injection framework, today is almost a complete Java EE replacement. Meaning: if you want Java EE without a true application server, then use Spring. And that boils down to using Tomcat with Spring in most cases.
So, the true answer is: you can still use Spring without much hassle, but use only what you need, if you really need it. Spring originates from 2003, when Java EE was a real pain in the neck, but nowadays Java EE has gotten more and more simple, almost to the point that it's preferred over Spring, especially EE 6.
Springsource Tools isn't needed for using Spring, but it is recommended for efficient Spring usage. If you stick with XML configuration, lack of tools assistance will hamper you in the long run.
My little rant is over, so I hope I helped you at least a bit.
Springsource Tool Suite is their customized distribution of Eclipse, and no you don't technically need it. You still only need the jar files, which can be found here.
You don't need SpringSource Tool Suite.
Spring is still the most popular lightweight Java MVC framework.
Spring is splitted into different modules (projects) to avoid big dependencies if you don't need them.
List of projects from springsource
spring-framework-3.1.0.M1.zip is 25.6 MB and can be found here
Have fun!
I think these technologies are really prior to java industry
A good knowledge of Core Java, Servlets and JSP is pretty much more than enough you need..
I'm not sure about struts, but for Spring, it helps to know about dependency injection and inversion of control, XML, and JavaBeans.
If I had to recommend a book, it would be Spring in Action
UPDATE
It's been pointed out to me that Spring in Action is about Spring 2.0, which it is. Spring 2.0 is almost four years old. Spring's first-party documentation makes wonderful reading. Check out the reference documentation for great prose and the Javadocs if you need more in-depth information.
In my opinion, the Spring in Action book is a bit behind the times now (Spring 2.0) and doesn't include any of the nifty new features in 2.5 or 3.0. I would start with the spring documentation.
Only in reference to Spring.
If your not familiar with dependancy injection, then spend a bit of time reading. I'd also suggest that your java knowledge includes being comfortable with Annotations, Reflection and even Aspect orientated programming. Most Spring books fail to keep pace, so unless your forced to use a particular version Spring 3.0 should be your starting point as this has many additions which can save a lot of time.
In reference to spring it is mandatory to have a little knowledge of J2SE, J2EE(Servlets, JDBC little bit), XML Schema and rest of the things you can learn while studying Spring Framework. Most of all JAVA knowledge is required :)
I am looking for feedback from experienced users on spring roo and appfuse. Which do you think does a better job reverse engineering database tables and generating a service layer, dao layer, and jpa entities?
If I am not mistaken, spring roo currently cannot reverse engineer a database.
Just a quick update to inform all users that stumble upon this thread now (or at least after today :)); With the new 1.1.0 release, Spring Roo now does support incremental database reverse engineering out of the box. See this release annoucement.
As a comment on the actual question: I don't think either of the two is way better than the other in the actual entity generation, but there is a big difference of course between AppFuse and Spring Roo aside from the entity generation. If you actually need DAO's, this is something that comes out-of-the-box in AppFuse and put partly in Spring Roo, but there is also a great addon for Spring Roo (Hades addon) that does a great job at this, maybe even better than AppFuse. Main reason to go for AppFuse, in my humble opinion, is if you require another Web Framework (ie Wicket. Tapestry or JSF) as front end then Spring MVC or GWT, as these are currently the only well supported Web Frameworks within Spring Roo (more coming though, like Flex etc.). Other reason you might go for AppFuse is if you want to use an IDE with full intellisense and code-completion support, but don't want to use Eclipse (you can use other IDE's, and build works perfectly well with Spring Roo, but due to the AspectJ files, which aren't recognized by Netbeans, other IDE's then Eclipse currently don't do code completion well for the Spring Roo generated/managed files).
But if you don't mind Eclipse (or better even the Spring Tools Suite) and do want to use GWT and/or Spring MVC, I'd recommend Spring Roo. Main reasons to go for Spring Roo is the, in my humble opinion, higher productivity, far better support, far higher momentum and activity, lower learning curve (for quick CRUD app generation) and of course the Rails like command shell from which you can quickly setup and configure your application.
Ps. Note that I haven't used AppFuse actively for over a year, so my knowledge of AppFuse is a bit rusty.
Roo is good to quickly put up stuff up (round-tripping is amazing)..but the lack of out-of-the-box provide for a services layer puts my needs in a bind. I know I can do #Services annotation and place code appropriately as mentioned in the documentation(too much work at startup). I wished Roo gave me a choice to have a services+dao layer...out-of-the-box.
That would (have made)/make Roo a killer app, imho
You are correct that you can't reverse engineer a database in Roo. There's an open JIRA item for this which you can vote up.
However, you could try using the Eclipse Hibernate tools to reverse engineer your database, then modify those objects to make them Roo Entities. That probably would involve a lot of manual work though.
For AppFuse, there's the AppFuse Maven plugin which can create the entire AppFuse project for you from an existing database. I'm not sure if it's currently working though, because the last person I mentioned it to said they couldn't get it working.
Depending on your requirements, you may also want to give the Grails framework a try. There's a tool called GRAG that can reverse engineer a Grails application from a database.
The ROO-435 issue is actually our most requested feature, so I'll be implementing that in Spring Roo within the next few weeks. In the meantime, Jason's suggestion of using the Eclipse Hibernate tools to create JPA annotated entities is an immediate solution that is fully Roo compatible.
I was thinking which framework would be a good choice to go into. I'm focusing on java apps and tested spring, grails and seam so far. I've also looked aboard java and gave ruby on rails a try too.
In future I will be focusing on portlet development which I've gone through already without a complete framework (just hibernate).
Maybe someone could share some experiences? Or point me to a corner which I don't looked in so far?
Regards and thanks for reading ;)
If you're doing this out of curiosity and to learn something new, rather than to meet specific requirements for a specific project, maybe you'll enjoy the Play! Framework. It contains a lot of stuff from other frameworks and is designed to get you up and going very quickly, with short development cycles and not a lot of arcanae.
Their stated purpose is to be "by Web developers for Web developers". They intend to put the fun back into Web programming.
This sounds good and I've read a few nice things about it in fora and blogs, but I haven't tried it myself yet so that's all the recommendation I can give.
Grails has a plugin for developing portlets, described here.
If you consider Groovy or Grail, you might consider ZK, too. It is an Ajax framework integrated well with Groovy and Grail.
I'd say you go with a framework that targets the programming language you're most proficient in. If you already are good in Java, and you're a quick learner ( to learn Groovy ), Grails could be a good choice.
If you'd like to go with another scripting language, say Ruby/Python, then choose Rails or Django, or Pylons ( the list could go on here ).
If you're going for a Java only framework, I'd go with Spring MVC.
You should have a look at the play framework (SO question).
Finally a Java framework made by Web developers. Discover a clean alternative to bloated enterprise Java stacks. Play focuses on developer productivity and targets RESTful architectures.
I was thinking which framework would be a good choice to go into. I'm focusing on java apps and tested spring, grails and seam so far. I've also looked aboard java and gave ruby on rails a try too.
FYI - Grails is using Spring and Hibernate underneath; SEAM uses JSF and Hibernate.
Grails is the Java equivalent of RoR. It's based on the same idea: "convention over configuration".
It's also important to be clear that Spring is far more than a mere web MVC framework. It's based on DI and AOP and encompasses persistence, remoting, enterprise services, etc. It supports portlet MVC, which is a plus given your requirements.
Personally, I would recommend straight Spring over any of your choices so far if you stick with Java. It's important to know something about what's going on under the covers. If you know Spring well, Grails will be easy.
I'd use Wicket rather than Play! because Play! requires Python as a semi-dependency. With Wicket, you only need Apache and Java and thats it.
I suggest you also check out here:
http://gokhan.ozar.net/best-java-web-frameworks/
I have pretty big background of .net, and I've decided that i want to port one of my websites to Java. (now with the asp.net MVC craze, I've figured I'd better learn a more mature approach to MVC).
i've downloaded eclipse (easyeclipse distro to be exact, and am ready and willing to develop my first website in java).
i've programmed j2me application before, so i know the language and some of the framework.
can someone guide me? any advice?
Although I'm not very aware of "asp.net mvc" is all about, I would suggest you to take a look at Spring it may be interesting.
Probably is too complicated at the beginning but when you get the concept it turns out very easy to follow.
Spring has 5 core modules ( which I don't remember exactly ) but they were like:
AOP
ORM
MVC
Core
( some other I'm missing here )
The MVC part uses a lot of annotations to make life easier. There's a very big community around Spring.
Here's an introductory article about spring.
Java has a ton of frameworks you can choose from. The technology stack that I use for my Java development is either:
Spring for IoC.
Hibernate for the data layer.
Struts2 for the MVC framework.
I have also swapped out spring and used Guice for the IoC.
Spring also has MVC, but I tend to like Struts2 better.
I'd recommend looking at Grails, it lets you become comfortable with all the java libraries and frameworks like Spring, SpringMVC, Hibernate, SiteMesh, and so on but gives you a much better DSL for web applications and much more concise code with the Groovy language (think of it as Java with dynamic typing, blocks, closures, and so on).
If you'd rather stick to pure Java I'd recommend looking at the Stripes framework and the following book:
http://pragprog.com/titles/fdstr/stripes
If you interested in web applications specifically, I would recommend using MyEclipse http://www.myeclipseide.com. Basically, this is a version of eclipse with all the web server integration and functionality built in. I've been using it for a few years and it's much easier to develop with than with plain vanilla eclipse. Depending on how much your going to use it, you have to decide whether the $55 annual subscription is worth it for you.
I'm a little confused. does spring framework actually a full blown framework? doesn't Java already have a framework? (by framework i mean all those misc libraries).