Hello. I've promised some (not so long) time ago to share my experiments
with C3 and Spring, and now I am ready to show some interesting
achievements.
Here is the source code:
https://github.com/igorzep/cocoon-springification
What it does...
1) Use traditional annotated Spring Controllers
I think it is better REST than Cocoon today. Those days when Cocoon was
a leader in this respect has passed, and it really was the best REST
framework from day one when nobody even used this word. But now Spring
is really powerful and I think Cocoon should not try to invent own
things but integrate with Spring as much as possible. In current form it
"disables" Spring functionality and replace with own much more limited
solution.
2) Use Cocoon Sitemap as Spring View
Again - traditional Spring way. Also i map Cocoon to WEB-INF so that
sitemap is hidden for direct browser access (good trick to workaround
lack of private pipelines in C3).
3) Use Spring FORM tag library in SAX pipeline
When it is very simple implementation it works quite good already, much
better than I expect from it myself...
4) Integrated Validation with Spring and Hibernate Validator
Again - traditional Spring 3 way of handling forms, together with
previous item can be a good foundation for replacing old Cocoon forms
module...
5) EclipseLink JPA
Just my favorite, as it implements both JPA and JAXB...
6) Mapping Spring model to XML with JAXB annotations
Just a quick hack as everything else...
7) JRebel compatible, just generate rebel.xml for "main" module
Unfortunately EclipseLink JRebel plugin does not work with latest
EclipseLink, but can be switched off easily. Otherwise I did a small fix
to XSLT transformer, so it rechecks for modifications correctly (not
included with sources) and it works much better than Cocoon RCL.
Actually Cocoon RCL destroyed root spring context on first invocation
and any future requests to EclipseLink didn't work at all.
I think that Cocoon RCL should be dropped at all - it is unusable for
something serious, if you do something more than totally trivial it
takes more time to fight with it, works almost always incorrectly and
saves no time as the result...
Thanks.
Discussions and critics are welcome.
