Spring Newbie

[Suman Chaudhuri]

Hi all,

I am a newcomer to Spring. Being a pretty advanced Struts developer, how hard is it to learn Spring ? I have not read the book Pro Spring yet, but does the book cover the basics as well as advanced level topics ?

Also, how does Tapestry compare to Spring ?

Does either integrate with JSF ?

[Lasse Koskela]

Originally posted by Suman Chaudhuri:
Does either integrate with JSF ?

I'm not too knowledgeable of existing tools for this integration but Spring can definitely be used together with either JSF or Tapestry (or pretty much any other presentation technology). In the end, Spring is a lot of things and you can pretty much pick and choose which parts of Spring you want to use.

[Emman lopez]

I am a struts deloper myself, I wonder also what is the learning curve in order to use Spring, I heard is better to use the Spring MVC framework than integrating struts with spring. is it true?

[Lasse Koskela]

Originally posted by Emman lopez:
I heard is better to use the Spring MVC framework than integrating struts with spring. is it true?

That depends largely on things other than the technical differences of these frameworks. If you've got a team of people skilled in Struts development, I'd be careful to migrate to Spring. Then again, if you for some reason don't like Struts, moving to Spring MVC should be pretty straightforward -- the concepts are very much alike.

[Suman Chaudhuri]

Do you see Spring becoming as mainstream as Struts ? I wonder is Struts is going to become "legacy" code in a few years, with Spring and Tapestry and Echo and other open source projects being the new generation of frameworks ? Or do you think Struts is here to stay ?

I understand that Spring offers a lot more than what Struts does, but do you foresee people porting over to Spring presentation from Struts ?

How much acceptance has Spring had in the past 1 year and where do you think it is headed ?

[Lasse Koskela]

Originally posted by Suman Chaudhuri:
Do you see Spring becoming as mainstream as Struts ? I wonder is Struts is going to become "legacy" code in a few years, with Spring and Tapestry and Echo and other open source projects being the new generation of frameworks ? Or do you think Struts is here to stay ?

I do believe Spring will become more mainstream than it is today. I also believe Struts will be around for at least a couple of years. Whether it (or Spring for that matter) will be around for longer than that depends on how actively the community develops those frameworks.

Originally posted by Suman Chaudhuri:
I understand that Spring offers a lot more than what Struts does, but do you foresee people porting over to Spring presentation from Struts ?

I don't see too many people porting their applications from Struts to Spring, but I do see people starting new projects with Spring a lot more often than a year ago.

[Rob Harrop]

I think that if you dive into Spring blind, then the learning curve is moderately high, although not restrictively so and no more than other frameworks.

I have heard from readers that the initial chapters of Pro Spring really help them to into the swing of things. Mainly I think this is because the code examples start out Spring free and we slowly refactor them into Spring piece-by-piece.

Rob