The plug was pulled on the project I was working on – adapting an opensource workflow engine (jBPM in my case) for use in an existing application.
Although it did hurt a bit (since I’ve done an extensive job understanding the target application), yet, the amount of time I spent on Spring (the framework of choice) were really thrilling.
Some of Spring ideas that kept a smile on my face were:
- The dependency injection (ease of understanding and adoption).
- Its Web MVC covering some of the drawbacks of Struts.
- Its integration with Hibernate and other O/R mapping.
- Its coverage for the different application layers (UI, Web MVC, O/R, Utilities).
- The ease of pluggability of various components and tools into the framework.
- The enthusiasm with which people are adopting and hence the growing community support.
- The continuous work and bug fixes on the project.
- Interceptors and AOP and their very good potential (still with many blurry issues for me).
- Web flow (which hasn’t been released yet).
Although Spring documentation are not targeted for newbies (or even half-seasoned developers), yet, one can get some guidance from them (Looking forward to buying one of the 4 Spring books out there – still waiting for an offer from the American University in Cairo library). Besides, what is the best way to learn than to do?
I’m leaning to believe in Spring as the Framework of Frameworks and I’ll definitely explore it further.