Category : J2EE
Review by : Lasse Koskela
Rating : 9 horseshoes
While many of the top notch Spring books offer reasonably thorough coverage of the Spring MVC framework along with other core Spring modules, there's not much printed material on Spring Web Flow. This book gives the Spring community a fix that'll keep us satisfied for the time being.
The authors do a good job at introducing in just a dozen pages enough fundamental concepts that a
Java web developer needs in order to be ready for the rest of the book. In other words, no long-winded descriptions of the XML configuration files needed for configuring Spring, no detailed descriptions of how to wrap your beans into proxies, etc. Instead, you're taken straight down to business.
The core of the book starts out by first describing the Spring MVC architecture, including the role of controllers and views. Followed by the description of the architecture, the authors take the reader to a rollercoaster ride through the Spring MVC processing pipeline, including how to customize URL mappings, for example.
The chapter on controller components covers everything I can think of and the chapter on views and different view types does a great job at showing how to configure alternative view resolvers, how to internationalize your application's message resources, and how to render alternative content types such as PDF and Excel sheets in addition to covering the mainstream templating languages used for generating HTML, including
JSP and JSTL as well as open source frameworks such as Velocity and FreeMarker.
An extra bonus point goes to the authors for including a section on
testing Spring applications, even though the focus is mostly on unit testing controllers which is kind of a low-hanging
fruit anyway. On the other hand, while topics such as validation and internationalization are discussed, the equally essential aspects of authentication and authorization are not given any attention.
The last two chapters, approximately 60 pages, are devoted to the brand new Spring Web Flow framework. I was glad to see the authors' pragmatic approach to stating the sweet spot for using Web Flow rather than proposing it as the "golden hammer" as they say. The explanation of the Web Flow concepts as well as the examples the authors use for guiding the reader through them are easy to understand.
As a summary, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and got a lot out of it. The only reason I'm not giving this book the absolute best rating possible is that there's a couple of security-related topics missing that I consider essential for any book dedicated to developing web applications.
More info at Amazon.com
More info at Amazon.co.uk