Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow

What is this book about? Today, an abundance of MVC frameworks - each with its own pros and cons - plague a web-developers decision to choose one. Out of them, frameworks like Struts, Webwork and Maverick are deemed as request-driven frameworks, where as JSF and Tapestry are deemed as component-driven frameworks. Request-Driven broadly means, that the framework does not hide the HTTP-ness of the web world, but provides absractions that can simplify your job to handle them. Component-Driven means, that the web-framework seeks to hide the HTTP-ness, and provides the developer with an abstraction equivalent to Swing programming. Both types of frameworks have their own advantages and disadvantages. Spring MVC falls into the request-driven web frameworks category. In my career, i have worked with many web frameworks. Out of all of them, i prefer Spring MVC for the following reasons 1. It has access to the full power of the Spring IoC and AOP container. 2. It is very well architected and brings true seperation of model, view and controller better than any other framework out there. 3. It is highly customizable. 4. It is interface driven, and doesnt force you to extend any framework classes. 5. It is easily testable - both unit and integration tests. 6. It helps apply good OO principles to the web-tier. 7. It provides easy-to-use template implementations of basic workflows. 8. It provides support for various view types(JSP, Velocity, Freemarker, etc) and completely decouples this support from other parts of the MVC. 9. It provides an exhaustive set of interface based hooks that one can customize or freshly implement for their own purposes. 10.And many more... The above list is by no means exhaustive. So, i sincerely suggest to consider this framework if you are researching on an MVC implementation for your next project. This book is all about Spring MVC and a sub-project called Spring Web Flow (SWF). Now, that you know what Spring MVC is, and where it fits into the plethora of available web-frameworks, you might be wondering what SWF is. Is it yet another web-framework that Spring supports? Is it a seperate implementation of Spring MVC? Is it something else? These kind of questions might come up, and i had all these questions in mind when spring announced SWF. Anyways, SWF attacks a different problem. It is a seperate and self-contained framework, where you can define flows. Each flow is potentially a conversation between the user and the server over multiple pages and requests. The flows can be defined declaratively, and integrated with the MVC framework of your choice for execution. Spring MVC, Struts, JSF, Portlet MVC are supported out-of-the-box, but it is easy to implement an integration for your favorite framework. How this book does it? There are quite a few spring framework books around, that covers the entire framework. Sadly, none of those books gives Spring MVC enough importance and coverage is decent at best. Those books are geared t

While many of the top notch Spring books offer reasonably thorough coverage of the Spring MVC framework along with other core Spring modules, there's not much printed material on Spring Web Flow. This book gives the Spring community a fix that'll keep us satisfied for the time being. The authors do a good job at introducing in just a dozen pages enough fundamental concepts that a Java web developer needs in order to be ready for the rest of the book. In other words, no long-winded descriptions of the XML configuration files needed for configuring Spring, no detailed descriptions of how to wrap your beans into proxies, etc. Instead, you're taken straight down to business. The core of the book starts out by first describing the Spring MVC architecture, including the role of controllers and views. Followed by the description of the architecture, the authors take the reader to a rollercoaster ride through the Spring MVC processing pipeline, including how to customize URL mappings, for example. The chapter on controller components covers everything I can think of and the chapter on views and different view types does a great job at showing how to configure alternative view resolvers, how to internationalize your application's message resources, and how to render alternative content types such as PDF and Excel sheets in addition to covering the mainstream templating languages used for generating HTML, including JSP and JSTL as well as open source frameworks such as Velocity and FreeMarker. An extra bonus point goes to the authors for including a section on testing Spring applications, even though the focus is mostly on unit testing controllers which is kind of a low-hanging fruit anyway. On the other hand, while topics such as validation and internationalization are discussed, the equally essential aspects of authentication and authorization are not given any attention. The last two chapters, approximately 60 pages, are devoted to the brand new Spring Web Flow framework. I was glad to see the authors' pragmatic approach to stating the sweet spot for using Web Flow rather than proposing it as the "golden hammer" as they say. The explanation of the Web Flow concepts as well as the examples the authors use for guiding the reader through them are easy to understand. As a summary, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and got a lot out of it. The only reason I considered not giving this book the absolute best rating possible is that there's a couple of security-related topics missing that I consider essential for any book dedicated to developing web applications.

I have used Spring for over a year including Spring MVC. This book covers the web framework in depth, I learned several new things. The most pleasant thing about the book is the author's insights into how Spring was designed and how properly constructed OO frameworks look like. The chapters on webflow are also excellent. Every serious developer should read this book even if they are not interested in Spring MVC!

I was actually surprised to see this on the bookshelf! The only exposure to Spring MVC documentation I've had was either on www.springframework.org or the book written by the spring authors themselves which doesn't necessarily have much appeal. This book is extremely well-written and the first three chapters provide a very good overview of Spring and some really good advice on developing a layered application in general. There's tons of information with clear examples. I admit, I'm only just more than halfway through the book, however, what I've seen so far is well worth the price. I'm definitely going to be designing my web applications using this framework going forward. There are a few errors here and there (nothing major), but overall it's an outstanding book.

I have been working with Spring since the 1.0 release. Mr. Ladd's book definately pushed my skill set forward. I highly recommend this book to active professionals.