Spring In Action 3 Book Question

[Mark Reyes]

Hi Sir,

Is the chapter on Spring MVC explains why Spring 3 opted out to use annotations over the concrete controller classes?

I must admit, I am still new in the process of learning the Spring framework and I am only able to create fairly simple apps but that is still Spring 2.5 since spring 3 is not yet officially release.

I got these questions because I am seeing some threads (here in javaranch and other forums) that discusses between annotations and xml configuration but I dont give any thoughts about it then since most of the online docs and google search that I am seeing are using xml files.

Now that spring 3 is offcially release, I would like to officially know if your book covers this topic.

[Craig Walls]

The MVC chapter will focus primarily on the annotation MVC model. That's because (1) it is better than the old style and (2) the old style MVC will eventually be deprecated and will go away.

The controller-class-hierarchy model (hereafter known as "Old MVC") was a bit more heavyweight in that controller implementations had to extend certain classes, implement certain methods, and those methods had to take certain arguments. The annotated model (hereafter known as "Spring @MVC") is a lot less demanding. In fact, it's *VERY* flexible with regard to how you write controllers. And, once you strip away the annotations, most Spring @MVC controllers are just POJOs and are therefore much easier to test.