Book - are you using better examples?

[eric givler]

What turned me off on the last edition of Spring in Action book was the example with Knights and Minstrels, etc. Once I saw that, I simply stopped reading. Is that still in there? Why not create examples that applicable to something other than an academic exercise?

I've always thought it would make sense to have a book that described how to build a PRODUCTION ready application, not some contrived example either. Rod Johnson's Expert One On One J2EE book does a good job at it. I had an old book on Struts called Profoessional Jakarta Struts. The whole book was about how to make an application where you'd key in a ticker symbol and it would return a quote. The quote would only come back for certain hard-coded Strings. You've got to be kidding me.

A second question would be: Are they realling deprecating all the controller classes in favor of annotations? I looked at Spring about a year ago, and I thought going from Struts to Spring didn't seem bad if I went the route of FormControllers, etc. The last I heard was that this is going away.

I do appreciate all your efforts though, and will definitely examine your next edition.

[Mark Spritzler]

1. In the first chapter there are Knights and Damsel in distress, haven't gotten much further if they are still around. But the purpose of them is to remove the need for the reader to have to figure out and understand the business domain in order to explain what Dependency Injection is about. I think a book is better to explain to people learning the framework from the beginning to understand the concepts and the best is to use an analogy like Craig did.

2) Yes, Spring doesn't want any of your code to be tied to the Framework at runtime. By extending or implementing Spring classes/interface you are tightly coupling your code to Spring. So that is why Annotations is a much better approach and why the other classes/interfaces are being deprecated. The Annotation approach is much simpler and quicker to do. Also with Annotation your Controller become complete POJOs which means you might already have classes written that with Annotations now become Controllers without any refactoring of code.

Mark