Does Spring Web Flow 2 give advices for integration into existing applications?

[Marco Ehrentreich]

Hi Markus & Sven!

I'm currently looking for solutions to modify an existing web application in particular to properly support the browser back button and to help maintain conversations for a more or less complex navigation through multiple pages.

From a first look at the posts here and some brief descriptions of Spring Web Flow I think it could possibly solve this two main issues I have. Maybe you could tell me if Spring Web Flow actually can help dealing with the back button problem and help maintaining conversational state and if you think it's possible to integrate into an existing non-Spring application. Moreover I'd be of course interested how many details your book gives on these topics!

Thanks in advance!

Marco

[Markus Staeuble]

First of all, if you want to use Spring Web Flow 2 the Spring 2.5.6 framework is required. Because Web Flow requires a base Spring infrastructure. The integration of Spring Web Flow inside a existing web application is possible. In this case you have to migrate the existing "flow" mechansimn to Web Flow, otherwise you can not use the advantages. In the book we show how to integrate with Spring MVC because its the best way to use Web Flow. In your case it depends on used controller framework / view mechansimn.

FYI: Conversation is one key element of web flow, therefore the maintance is done from the framework. The back button problem is solved by the framework, too.

[Marco Ehrentreich]

Thanks for your answer!

A quick move to the Spring framework won't be an option because we're unfortunately running a (very) old version of Struts as our web framework.

Anyway, it's good to hear that Spring would be an alternative for future developments which can handle those typical issues. Of course the ideas and features of the whole Spring framework sound very nice.

One more question, do you know how the management of conversational state in Spring works compared to JBoss Seam? I don't have very much practical experience with Seam but its implementation mostly based on simple Annotation looks very easy to use. Is this the case for Spring Web Flow, too?


Marco

[Vyas Sanzgiri]

yes