Java EE 6 and the Spring Framework

Recently two sessions at JavaOne 2011 covered the relationship between Java EE 6 and the Spring Framework. 

Java EE vs Spring Framework Shootout - This session compares the Spring and Java EE stacks in terms of Web frameworks. It re-examines the motivations behind the Spring framework and explores the emergence of the Java EE programming model to meet the challenges posed. The presentation provides insight into when Spring and/or Java EE is appropriate for a building Web applications and if they can coexist.

Best Practices for Migrating Spring Applications to Java EE 6 - The Spring Framework has no doubt played a major role in evolving how we write enterprise applications on the Java platform today, but it is still a proprietary framework owned by a single company. The age of having to rely on such proprietary frameworks in order to develop decent enterprise applications is now over, and using Java EE 6 has become an even easier way to develop enterprise applications based on standards, which makes it the best choice for any enterprise application. In this session, you will experience how to migrate a typical full-stack Spring application to a standards-based, completely portable Java EE 6 application, including integration tests. 

Both these presentations bring forth Java EE as a standards based, easier and better alternative to the proprietary Spring Framework. They also cover scenarios of migrating and co-existence with Spring. Please go through these presentations for re-evaluating the usage of Spring Framework in your application stack.

For best practices on integrating the Spring Framework with the WebSphere Application Server please look at the following whitepaper.

SCA 1.0.1 Beta Refresh Available

Service Component Architecture has 2 primary mechanisms for vendors to extend the basic assembly model: access ways to and from services (bindings) and adding new implementation kinds that can be assembled and composed using SCDL (implementations).

For this update of the beta code, available here, we've been able to augment our original beta drop with additional support in both directions:

Bindings:

• Web 2.0 bindings for JSON-RPC and ATOM services.
• Additional support for JMS over WebSphere MQ.

Implementations:

• OSOA support for implementation.jee.
  
• UI components which support html/javascript implementations where SCA is used to wire together browser interactions with services available over JSON-RPC and ATOM. This support uses DOJO subroutines to accomplish the JavaScript wiring.
• We have begun our work on implementation.spring to encapsulate, expose and compose your Spring applications as services in your enterprise's SOA. I'll note for the record we are not shipping the Spring framework with WebSphere and you'll have to get the Spring Framework (2.5.5) from SpringSource.
  

But Wait! There's more... Thrown into the mix of new capabilities we've added support for:

• using SCA annotations in JEE components so you can leverage SCA directly in your JEE applications.
• using SDO 2.1.1 which derives its implementation from our new XML core provided by the XML Feature Pack for WAS V7.

That's quite a lot of new support to chew on, and the team worked hard to remove many of the restrictions that were part of the first beta of 1.0.1 and even delivered a virtual machine image of the beta if installing software isn't your bag.

Finally, the early programs site which supports our beta has a lot of collateral like white papers and demos as well as a forum to answer your questions.

I can't think of how to make a beta much easier to get feedback than we've tried to make this delivery -- if there's still an inhibitor that you're experiencing that we could do different and make your life easier, my team is all ears.

We look forward to your feedback and your participation.

Using Spring with WAS and WAS ND

Interface21, the company behind Spring, announced in June 2007 that it has certified and will support WAS as a deployment platform for the Spring application framework. This is as a result of a collaborative effort between Interface21 and IBM to test - on all WAS platforms - a number of scenarios that use Spring with WAS. There's also an interview, on developerWorks, between IBM's Paul Buck and Interface21's Rod Johnson, discussing the impact of this effort.

One of the results of this collaborative effort is an update to the paper on developerWorks that describes some of the best practices for using Spring with WAS. For example, this illustrates how Spring's declarative transaction demarcation is configured for WAS and how data sources should be declared in a Spring application context definition for injection into a transactional application.