J2EE without the bloat - Spring, what else?

[MildredSnatch]

I'm looking at various middleware solutions and I like the idea of avoiding sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut-EJBs. The Spring Framework appears to be one solution. Has anyone used this framework? What pitfalls are there? What was it run on? What alternatives are there? Lend us yer code...

[Cowboy Bob]

I'm looking at various middleware solutions and I like the idea of avoiding sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut-EJBs. The Spring Framework appears to be one solution. Has anyone used this framework? What pitfalls are there? What was it run on? What alternatives are there? Lend us yer code...

Spring is excellent. I used it to build this - http://blx1.bto.org/btos/

Used it in conjunction with Hibernate - http://www.hibernate.org/ for the persistence layer - and Andromda - http://www.andromda.org/ - to generate the DAOs and DTO/service stubs from a UML diagram

As for lending you my code, sure, why not? - http://mpsc-modules.sourceforge.net/

[MildredSnatch]

AndroMDA - manna from heaven?

Cheers Cowboy Bob

AndroMDA - I'm skim reading it and it appears to be too good to be true. Is this one of those "I draw pictures, it writes the code" sort of thing? What are the pitfalls? In a management precis. In bullet points. Of ten words or less.

http://blx1.bto.org/btos/ looks good. I'm very tempted by "Identification Guide to European Non-Passerines".

Thanks for your code... but it's appears to be documented. What are you playing at?

[Cowboy Bob]

Cheers Cowboy Bob

AndroMDA - I'm skim reading it and it appears to be too good to be true. Is this one of those "I draw pictures, it writes the code" sort of thing? What are the pitfalls? In a management precis. In bullet points. Of ten words or less.

http://blx1.bto.org/btos/ looks good. I'm very tempted by "Identification Guide to European Non-Passerines".

Thanks for your code... but it's appears to be documented. What are you playing at?

Andromda is great. It doesn't write your code for you, but say you want to add an extra column to a DB table, you add it to your UML diagram and it adds it to your DTOs and stubs (as well as your Hibernate config files) automatically so you don't have the chore of updating all those objects and XML files manually.

There aren't really any pitfalls, as long as you remember that it doesn't write any logic for you. You also need to keep an eye out for lazy loading issues with Hibernate as Andromda isn't intelligent enough to manage that kind of thing. If you're happy to use the "Open Session In View" pattern then those problems go away, but if you want finer grained control then you need to keep a close eye on what Andromda generates for the Hibernate config files.

As for documentation, that is a low priority at the moment as I've got sh!tloads of other work on. The JavaDoc is all there and up-to-date though.

[MildredSnatch]

Thanks for the guidance about AndroMDA - I'm getting cracking with it now.

I was being ironic about the documentation - sorry if it appeared otherwise - you've provided lots of documentation throughout the code. I wish I was always so diligent.