I've been looking at it some and I do see some strengths it has, but some of those strengths I also see as potential weaknesses (maybe).
In my short study (and I mean very short:) of Spring, here's what I've been thinking so far...
(Note, Spring handles a lot more than the just the front end framework, but since Struts is mostly a front end framework these comments about Spring are in relation to the web component portion of Spring).
Flexibility. Here is where I think Spring's major strength lies. You are given some out-of-the-box controllers and stuff but how the application is put together with the framework allows for a lot of flexibility. In a large corporation, though, this all could be a weakness if one isn't careful. It seems very easy to have part of an application being coded using entirely different Spring concepts than another part. Struts has this problem as well, although it appears more difficult to abuse since, unless you start really doing funky things in Action execute methods (seen it done), it's pretty easy to stay within 'best practices' guidelines.
Learning curve. I can't really tell which is an easier framework to pick up and learn. I've been working with Struts for a long time now, so it's difficult for me to look at this objectively. The fact that there are a lot more ways of developing web applications with Spring can be somewhat of an obstacle for picking it up quickly.
View tags. I happen to like the basic struts html tags related to forms. Spring doesn't come with much of a tag library that I can tell. I'm not sure how tags such as the Nested tag will play with Spring. Currently you have to provide all form field values with JSTL... not a big deal except a bit unwieldy for nested beans (imo).
Lack of ActionForms. Spring doesn't use ActionForms and I like this. You can tie a Value Object right to your front end form. Very nice. If Struts got away from ActionForms I'd be very happy (although I'd lose some of the nice html tags functionality).
Spring also uses a lot of cool stuff like IoC (Inversion of Control/Dependency Injection).
Right now, as it stands, I'm finding it difficult to justify switching over to 'yet another framework' (Sheesh how many are there now - Spring, WebWorks..:). I've run into some limitations using Struts (such as its nice handling of a 'form wizard flow' where you might need to action chain - gets a bit ugly) but overall I don't really have many complaints about Struts. It appears that I'm not going to gain that much switching over to Spring. A lot of my good buddies in #FunkyCodeMonkey on darkmyst.org are former Struts users and they seem to like Spring better - although, they haven't given me enough compelling reasons to jump ship.
I've only begun to start looking into Spring so I'm sure I'm missing a TON of points that could be made. I'd appreciate any other comments good or bad concerning either framework. I'm sure many of you fall into the same frustration-boat that I feel like I'm in- "So many technologies out there - only so much time." I've trying to determine if I really need to be investing the time to explore this framework more when I could be exploring other things I need to learn more about. I'm sure many of you can relate:)
Thanks,
-- Rick
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