[J2] Evaluation of Spring Framework

[Scott T. Weaver]

As much of a Pico fan as I am, I still felt it important that we 
evaluate Spring Framework to see what all the noise was about, the 
Spring guys are getting a helluva lot of good press these days.  We 
initially decided against Spring in our initial framework evaluation 
because, at the time, you had to download all of Spring, including there 
web framework, to use it.  Spring has now separated the framework into 
nice, bite-size pieces, so you only take what you need.

I spent Friday and Saturday learning Spring Framework and took the 
liberty of trying to get Jetspeed 2 to run on top of Spring.  By the end 
of the day yesterday (Monday) I had Jetspeed 2 running using the Spring 
Framework.  I would like to ask everyone to take a look at the Spring 
Framework documentation and look at the pooled-datasource-support.xml 
and jetspeed-spring.xml in WEB-INF/assembly and get their thoughts on a 
possible move to Spring as our primary light-weight container and to 
possibly deprecate the Pico engine and ComponentManager.

Here are some of the pluses I have found with Spring Framework:
1.  It has great documentation and a relatively small learning curve 
(obviously, because I was able to get J2 running on it 3 days!).
2.  It has a very active community, the user list gets a ton of traffic.
3.  Spring has a very full-featured, well-documented AoP api built right 
into the framework.  We could take advantage of this for security, 
caching, etc.
4.  Spring had a thread local factory implementation built-in with 
examples were as in Pico I had to right a component adapter to perform 
the same logic myself.
5.  As cool as Groovy is, IMOHO, the spring configuration is much more 
readable and far easier to maintain.
6.  Pico has a lot of "moving" dependencies that, from time to time, 
cause us build problems.  Spring is in release 1.0.2 and all its deps 
are also release versions.
7.  Seems more efficient from a start up standpoint.  Spring is about 
2/3 faster if you look at the TestEngine (Pico) at 9~seconds versus the 
TestSpringEngine at 3~ seconds.
8.  Spring has very nice support for adding properties straight into 
your configuration.
9.  Pico requires that you implement the lifecycle interface, 
Startable.  Spring allows you to define init and destroy methods in the 
config.
10. I is very easy to mix constructor based dep injection with property 
dep injection.

By default the build is using the original PicoEngine so as not to 
interfere with anyone's existing apps. 

Enabling SpringEngine:
Go into the web.xml uncomment the init-param that specifies the 
SpringEngine and comment out the one that is using the PicoEngine.  It's 
just that simple ;)

p.s.
I think it would be unfair to us (Jetspeed developers) to give all the 
credit to Spring for the ease of transition.  We all have done a 
tremendous job writing well-designed components that are portable and 
that demonstrate low-coupling along with high re-useability.  This just 
goes to reaffirm that Jetspeed 2 is moving in the right direction in 
terms of design and architecture. Kudos to us all ;)

Regards,
--
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*           Scott T. Weaver              *
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