[Thomas Trostel]

For those of you who haven’t seen Spring before there is a very good introduction located at http://www.theserverside.com/articles/article.tss?l=SpringFramework.

Spring is a lightweight framework that sits somewhere short of a full blown J2EE deployment and is also extremely modular. It has been broken into 7 distinct modules:

– Core: supporting utilities and their own bean container
– AOP: source level meta-data and AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) interface
– ORM: (Object Relational Mapping) with support for Hibernate, iBaits, and JDO
– DAO: Transaction infrastructure with JDBC and DAO support.
– Web: Web/Application Context, Multi-Part resolver, and web utilities
– Context: Application Context, UI support, validation, JNDI, EJB (support & remoting), mail
– Web MVC: Web Views JSP/Velocity/PDF/Excel

There is a lot in there … the pieces of interest in this context are the ORM and DAO components. Looking on the web there is a rudimentary Spring IDE plug in for Eclipse already but it measures up fairly short in terms of leaving the user with a starting template from which to build a project. We’d honestly be looking for the higher level transaction support.

[Ivar Vasara]

also see related thread at: http://myeclipseide.com/PNphpBB2+file-viewtopic-t-3139.html

[Riyad Kalla]

Well this seems to be getting to be a popular request. Keep voting guys.

[Thomas Trostel]

I was surprised nobody had mentioned it before. Part of the attention may be due to the new O’Reilly book “Better, Faster, Lighter Java” by Bruce A. Tart and Justin Gehtland. I’m planning on getting a copy this weekend if its in our local bookstore.

[grimholtz]

Don’t forget to get the Spring bible, “J2EE Development Without EJB” by Mr. and Mrs. Spring themselves — Rod Johnson and Juergen Hoeller.

[Ivar Vasara]

@ttrostel wrote:

I was surprised nobody had mentioned it before. Part of the attention may be due to the new O’Reilly book “Better, Faster, Lighter Java” by Bruce A. Tart and Justin Gehtland. I’m planning on getting a copy this weekend if its in our local bookstore.

I had that book for all of two days before returning it. It seemed like a nicely edited blog.. a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I was looking for a discussion of lightweight practices & tools and found BFL Java to be somewhat weak.. “J2EE development without ejb” on the other hand, far exceeded my expectations. It starts a little slowly, bordering on ranting against EJB.. but as the it progresses it gets better. I found the testing chapter to be particularly fantastic and is almost worth the price of the book itself … quite odd since I had every intention of skipping the chapter when I bought the book. I’d highly recommend it over BLFJ..

[Thomas Trostel]

Thanks … I took a look at it in the bookstore this weekend fully expecting to buy it. After flipping through it I wasn’t that impressed. Unfortunately they didn’t have the “J2EE development without EJB” book on the shelf to peruse.

I spent the money on a hot cup of Starbucks coffee instead while looking for other things.

Thanks for the heads up.

[Riyad Kalla]

I spent the money on a hot cup of Starbucks coffee instead while looking for other things.

That’s an expensive cup of coffee… 🙂

What I would appreciate from you Spring guys is to comment (as you learn Spring) on the types of things you want animated. Considering that no one on our team has experience with Spring, its tough for us to figure out (by staring at the framework) what we can automate.

So if you could give comments like “In spring there is the idea of mapping configs, these are generated by BLAH, it would be nice if BLAH BLAH”, something like that, to give us an idea.

I’m asking now because clearly Spring is popular and only more and more people will want support for it, so we might as well start collecting ideas now.

[Thomas Trostel]

Aha … touche’

First to create the Spring DAO mapping and transactional stuff you’re going to need the following libraries included in your project build:

spring-core.jar – Base functionality for the Spring framework
spring-dao.jar – Data Access Object stuff
spring-orm.jar – Object Relational Management stuff

There are two base factories we would be interested in from a configuration standpoint, the BeanFactory and the ConfigurationFactory … lets concentrate on the BeanFactory first.

Now … right now we’re creating a HibernateSessionFactory class configured with hibernate.hbm.xml to start up the framework. That would get wrapped by Spring so we need to move the elements into their bean factory. The particular configuration we are testing uses the XmlBeanFactory class as a starting point for a stand alone java aplication.

Instantiating the bean factory in this case is as simple as:

=====

// Initialize the bean factory with the worlds simplest bean
InputStream is = null;

try {
is = new FileInputStream(directory + “/beans.xml”);
} catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
logger.error(e.getMessage());
e.printStackTrace();
}

XmlBeanFactory factory = new XmlBeanFactory(is);

=====

The bean XML file needs to have a reference to the data source, session factory, transaction manager, and whatever services you are interested in. Here is a sample:

=====

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!DOCTYPE beans PUBLIC “-//SPRING//DTD BEAN//EN” “http://www.springframework.org/dtd/spring-beans.dtd”&gt;

<beans>
<description>Spring Sample Beans Configuration</description>

<bean id=”dataSource”
class=”org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource” destroy-method=”close”>
<property name=”driverClassName”><value>oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver</value></property>
<property name=”url”><value>jdbc:oracle:thin:@some.server.org:1521:oracle_sid</value></property>
<property name=”username”><value>USER</value></property>
<property name=”password”><value>PASS</value></property>
</bean>

<bean id=”sessionFactory”
class=”org.springframework.orm.hibernate.LocalSessionFactoryBean”>
<property name=”dataSource”><ref local=”dataSource”/></property>
<property name=”mappingResources”>
<list>
<value>com/ttrostel/spring/hibernate/SomeObject.hbm.xml</value>
</list>
</property>
<property name=”hibernateProperties”>
<props>
<prop key=”hibernate.dialect”>net.sf.hibernate.dialect.Oracle9Dialect</prop>
</props>
</property>
</bean>

<bean id=”transactionManager”
class=”org.springframework.orm.hibernate.HibernateTransactionManager”>
<property name=”sessionFactory”><ref local=”sessionFactory”/></property>
</bean>

<bean id=”objectService” class=”com.ttrostel.spring.ObjectService”>
<property name=”sessionFactory”>
<ref bean=”sessionFactory”/>
</property>
</bean>
</beans>

======

Looks very similar to the hibernate.hbm.xml which would be easy to parse and keep in sync

in the implementation … again stand alone …

we can get an instance of the object service as follows:

====

ObjectService myObjectSrv = (ObjectService) factory.getBean(“objectService”);

====

then you can pretty much go ahead and use the service at will .. for example

====

List liSomething = myObjectSrv.getSomethinById(“123”);

====

and ObjectService would look like this

====

public class ObjectService extends HibernateDaoSupport{

/** Find all the things matching a given string
* @param strId
* @return
*/
public List getSomethinById(String strId) {

return getHibernateTemplate().find(“from Something as thing where thing.id = ?”,
strId, Hibernate.STRING);
}

====

Transactional boundries are defined in the bean XML file and are by service bean. You can demarcate which other beans participate in each transactions and if the transaction should be propogated.

…. not sure if thats a good starting point or not. We’ll try to keep you updated as we progress.

Please excuse the disorganized thought process … we’re trying to get a good handle on it ourselves.

[Andrew Freeman]

See the https://appfuse.dev.java.net/ for lots of Hibernate, Struts, Spring, etc integration.

[Thomas Trostel]

Hmm … that looks pretty nifty … wonder if that could be folded in as a wizard starting project.

[grfyljq]

Thanks for listening to the many posts about this issue including mine:
https://www.genuitec.com/forums/topic/the-accenture-bellsouth-wishlist/&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=spring+hibernate
I will definitely be renewing my subscription and recommending this to all my colleagues.

[Scott Anderson]

Well thank you very much! We always appreciate user feedback and enhancement suggestions. Version 3.8 GA will have greatly improved hibernate support over Beta 2, so we hope you like it. If not, I’m sure we’ll get some constructive feedback. 😉

[Brian Lee]

I definitely like the direction MyEclipse is taking – adding Spring support is a great!

@awf999 wrote:

See the https://appfuse.dev.java.net/ for lots of Hibernate, Struts, Spring, etc integration.

Yeah, I agree – AppFuse is definitely worth taking a look at since it is basically a project that integrates Spring, Struts/Webwork, Hibernate/Ibatis. No need to reinvent the wheel.

[rmwilliams4]

I cast a vote for Spring support. In particular it would be nice when using Hibernate if the config stuff could be located inside a Spring config file instead of a hibernate.properties or hibernate.hbm.xml file.

Also a graphical view of the AOP stuff in Spring would be cool – similar to the interface presented by AspectJ in Eclipse.

Thanks for a great product.

[Author]

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