The Spring Experience - Day 2

I focused on web framework related sessions today and came away with a wealth of knowledge and a long list of technologies to investigate further. Keith Donald gave a presentation on full stack web frameworks that was very interesting. He gave a very unbiased perspective on how frameworks like Grails, Rails, Django and others excel and lag with respect to about 10 criteria that comprise a "full stack" web framework (AJAX, REST, data binding, security, testability, etc...). He offered that Spring really doesn't have a full stack web framework, but instead acts as a foundation for them (Grails being built on top of it for instance). That is changing however as Spring MVC and WebFlow are adapting and integrating with some other technologies to really provide a complete offering.

I attended a few other sessions that focused on REST with Spring, AJAX offerings, JSF and WebFlow based apps, and Reasonable Server Faces. They all provided ton of information outside of my traditional area of expertise (middleware and persistence).

I think the most striking thing that I realized in these sessions though was how much of a huge step up in productivity there is in Spring 2.5. Annotations seem like a much better fit for metadata and being able to tell the container to only autowire a few certain dependencies right at their declaration point is immensely useful. Spring Security (formerly ACEGI) has gone from around a minimum of 150 lines of configuration to about 15 for the simplest cases by making use of these constructs. Spring 2.5 maintains backwards compatibility as well, so run, don't walk to the download if you haven't already.