Spring (DI and IOC) vs. JSF

[Mike Himstead]

Hi,

I'm migrating a small Struts 1 application to a JSF application. Tthe application at hand uses Spring to inject its dependencies between action classes, services, DAOs and JUnit classes. I created backing beans to hold the request parameters a user might enter and a controller method (e. g. a method called save to persist user input). Honestly I'm lost about how to combine Spring's DI and the bean's JSF life cycle. I can't inject the service into the bean as the bean will be recreated for each request. For the very same reason I can't inject the backing bean to the service (which would be conceptionally wrong anyways). The Struts approach had the action classes as a seperate tier: the action classes were Spring beans. I could (re-)create this tier by hand, but I'd like to know if there's a simpler approach.

[Mark Spritzler]

Why not just use the services as JSF backing beans. There is an ELVariableResolver class that allows you to do such a thing.

Mark

[Mike Himstead]

I'm not around my own computer now, so I can't try it right now. One question comes to my mind, though: wouldn't the two life cycles still interfere if I use the services as backing beans? Spring creates the services but the JSF life cycle recreates them with each request (when in request scope)?

[Mark Spritzler]

Mike Himstead wrote:I'm not around my own computer now, so I can't try it right now. One question comes to my mind, though: wouldn't the two life cycles still interfere if I use the services as backing beans? Spring creates the services but the JSF life cycle recreates them with each request (when in request scope)?

Will it. I think the variable resolver fixes any issues if there were any.

The Service is created once by the ApplicationContext and just reused in each request.

Mark

[Mike Himstead]

Hi Mark,

got the time to figure it out, it was pretty easy once I know what to look for. I inject my services into the managed beans which seems to be a very easy approach well suited for small projects; I'm fine with it. One thing I have to figure out now is how to call backing bean methods directly (like I would call a Struts action) to retrieve data from database before accessing the JSP, but that's a total different story unrelated to Spring and JSF.