Using IOC

[kundan varma]

Hi All,
Should we use spring with application server. I want to use spring to get the benefit of IOC or DI . But normally all article talk about spring without app server so i am a bit confused. Any suggestion??
Thanks and regards,
kundan

[Mattias Arthursson]

Usually you won't need an application server, even though there's really nothing that stops you from doing it. Spring handles most of the stuff you would normally use an application server to do; object management, transactions, persistance, plus a whole lot of other useful stuff.

For your average webapp you just use Tomcat, setup a Spring context in the configuration files and you're on your way.

J2EE services, such as JMS server, JNDI server and EJB container, are not included in Spring (although it helps you to integrate against the services). You usually don't need the two latter if you're building your system from scratch, and if you need to use JMS you can use a standalone JMS provider, so in my opinion there's very few situations where you need a full application server.

[kundan varma]

what about the scalibility and failover things which we need from clustering environment of app server???

[Mattias Arthursson]

As I understand it Spring applications have proven to scale very well. The Spring IoC container in itself adds very little overhead (as compared to your traditional J2EE application server).

Not sure about clustering, but if you need clustering capabilities (such as a distributed cache for example), I think you'll need to find a product to do that for you, e.g. from Terracotta.