Comments on: Day 3 of the Spring Workshop – On Persistence and Transactions and ever more Test Driven Development

By: Jettro Coenradie

Jettro Coenradie — Sat, 11 Jun 2005 18:07:35 +0000

Nice to see a discussion coming up. It was about a year ago when I started playing with ADF and spring. At that time I asked myself the same question. Never really got to an answer. Today it becomes more complicated since adf now has JHeadstart and Spring has, well a lot. I happen to have a little experience in projects with both frameworks as well. I think using the right tools and having some experience, spring can be very productive as well. Creating something new with JHeadstart turns out to be a little complicated when creating something different than the usual CRUD application. But JHeadstart has evolved since then as jspring has. I am very curious about exprience of other developers with both frameworks. Looking forward to your dicussion that is coming up

By: Jettro Coenradie

Jettro Coenradie — Sat, 11 Jun 2005 18:06:09 +0000

By: Lucas

Lucas — Sat, 11 Jun 2005 05:04:07 +0000

Hi Andrej,

It is all good stuff I think. However, what is your idea about the fact that ADF Binding Framework so clearly favors ADF BC over POJO? Have you got any idea whether it would be viable to extend the POJO BindingAdapters to achieve similar support as currently exists for ADF BC? Is having a POJO-only Service Layer (no ViewRowImpl, no ApplicationModule etc.) valuable? And is it valuable enough to give up the ADF BC benefits currently in ADF (and in the IDE)?

Or should I look at other opportunities for mixing ADF and Spring? It is definitely worth brainstorming about!

By: Andrej

Andrej — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 05:34:17 +0000

Hi Lucas,

I’m currently writing a small app to learn about spring, hibernate 3, jsf and jdk1.5. So far i really like spring, and hibernate 5 with annotations is also pretty nice.

I feel that adf (bindings) and spring are trying to achieve the same goal, accessing data and services in a consistant way from the ui. Adf is doing this by adding an extra layer of functionality between the business services and the views, springs is doing this by making everything available as pojo’s. The result is that adf scares you at first by all the extra methods and classes, and spring makes everything look easy, because everything is a pojo.

Ofcourse, adf adds a lot of extra functionality, and most of the complexity is hidden by the tools and wizards in jdeveloper.

In my opinion adf was made by oracle to make programming easy for tools (it allows oracle to provide drag and drop data controls, etc.) and spring was made to make programming easy for developers.

By: Aino

Aino — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 23:24:56 +0000

But what actually is a POJO, a JavaBean and a domain object? Althought they have different, but overlapping, ‘definitions’, people tend to be not very precise in using the terms and mix them. Spring is all about beans, but in its description it clearly refers to POJO’s. How OO are javabeans and is a MyOwnViewRowImpl less OO then a Javabean or a jdbc.Rowset. But OO is not only about POJO’s, but, among others, also about inheritance and abstraction (with interfaces). This is extensively used in the Spring Framework and, as I recall, also in ADF BC. So it will always be a trade-off between pure OO and a less OO but more pragmatic approach.
I share yourt concerns about implementation code in services objects (and often also on other places especially on integration ‘points’). Spring is in my experience the first framework that seems to be able (as far as I (as a spring novice) can see) to make implementation agnostic code and is (almost) non-intrusive. It is really an advantage and offers great flexibility but often a factory (or another pattern) that provide different implementations (maybe based on a property) does the job as well and also result in much less xml files. But in both cases, it is essential to code against interfaces.