Question on Spring Webflow

[Joe San]

What is this? Is this something like Struts? How different is it from Spring MVC?

[Sagar Kale]

In traditional web application development, we have to manage UI flows programmatically, so these flows are hard to maintain. Spring Web Flow offers a flow definition language that can help separate UI flows from presentation logic in a highly configurable way, so the flows can be easily changed and reused.

[Joe San]

How different is this from Struts then?

[Sagar Kale]

I do not know Spring Web flow. But what I know about it is meant for making things easier for a developer when he/she is dealing with a flow of pages like user move from one page to another for specific goal. Struts do not provide you anything for special when you do coding for set of pages which will are considered as a group of pages for flow. This is what my concept of Spring Web flow. But I am not very sure about it.

[Hong Anderson]

Jothi Shankar Kumar wrote:How different is this from Struts then?

It's for handle complex flow.
If you have a flow like this:

Page A [condition 1]---> Page B1 [condition 3] ----->Page C1
                                 [condition 4] ----->Page B2 [condition 7]----> Page D
                                                              [condition 8]----> Page B2
       [condition 2]---> Page B2 [condition 5] ----->Page C2 ---> Page D
                                  [condition 6] ----->Page C3 [condition 9]---> Page D
                                                              [condition 10]---> Page B1

Imagine how you can implement this with Struts.

[Joe San]

Then could we integrate WebFlow into an application which already employs Struts 2? Ok I understood the potential here but another question is how does WebFlow differ from Spring MVC?

[Markus Staeuble]

"Spring Web Flow is the module of Spring for implementing flows. The Web Flow engine plugs into the Spring Web MVC platform and provides declarative flow definition language." (from the reference documentation)

Spring Web Flow is a optimal addition to Spring MVC, but it can't replace a controller framework.

[Joe San]

But I'm not able to see te difference between a Controller that decides the page flow from this explicit Spring Web Flow??

[Padmapriya Ranganathan]

I'm also got confused, why do we need a separate Spring WebFlow for page flow? Can't we just deal this with Spring MVC itself?

[Sagar Kale]

Padmapriya Ranganathan wrote:I'm also got confused, why do we need a separate Spring WebFlow for page flow? Can't we just deal this with Spring MVC itself?

We can do it through programming. But spring web flow makes it far much easier do code and maintain that is what I feel.