Tag Archives: Spring

Spring Framework Vs. JEE – Part III

This is my final blog on this topic, hopefully. Part I of the blog can be found in here and Part II of this blog can be found in here.

I do at times think that my blog title itself is misleading or rather incorrect as I don’t feel that there needs to be a comparison between the two as both can exists together in one application without any issues at all. In fact if that’s the case we can use the best of both and be happy. But, there does exist this debate for a very long time and now a days Oracle also at times gives a comment to kill Spring Framework (buy and kill it to reduce competition, Oracle’s buying spree logic) and go with standards. Being the creators and maintainers of the Java language they do have the right to promote JEE but I feel they don’t have to have such a stance IMHO.

The community with full adoption of language has made it to a be a standard. Similarly when Spring Framework came in existence it was indeed helping Java developers use Java and avoid the complexities to develop enterprise application. In fact we have to give full credit to Spring Framework in keeping Java language alive and kicking. I have heard many times, even from my own managers that Java is too heavy and not that good for application development when you compare .NET. Spring to some extent have been bale to bring that easiness to it by taking the complexities away. At the moment also there might not be that much comparison between easiness with respect to .NET, but community is ready to develop applications using Java. Again for enterprise application comparing .NET and Java (JEE) is not that of a good idea because of so many reasons. Don’t want to divulge too much off the topic here.

As Kelly Tisdell mentions in his blog, JEE has definitely taken some page out of Spring Book and added onto its big Java bible and spreads a word across that “Java is standard, so migrate to JEE from Spring to be in standard”. It doesn’t say directly that stop using Spring but it has that tone in it.

Even after taking those pages, to develop an enterprise application from scratch using JEE does have its won complexities and Spring does have that easiness to it (might be subjective and debatable, but that what i feel). Most of nicer features in Spring has now crept into JEE under different names and much refined fashion (JEE have learned from mistakes and corrected it) for sure and that’s the reason developers have been prompted to think for this migration.

I wanted to put more facts in here rather than my opinions, but after so long I have indeed lost interest in filling in more details and i thought that i will just give my opinion and close this not so ending blog post.  Apologies for same.

In my opinion, Spring and JEE should marry each other and an enterprise application should be developed taking into good points from both. I am in no way saying that JEE or Spring scores over the other because both are really good platforms to develop your enterprise applications.

Page Visitors: 305

Spring Professional Certification Exam

With Spring Framework gaining recognition day by day, getting certified will be one of the most valuable credentials in Java.

Can I write this exam?

One of the pre-requisites to write this exam is to have a training taken from SpringSource on Core Spring. If that’s the case, why should we have a book which also aims at helping readers to prepare for SpringSource Certification? Earlier there was an alternative which is called “Grandfathered” candidate, whereby an individual having adequate Proficiency evaluated by SpringSource could by-pass the training and get the exam voucher. While writing this book, I could read from SpringSource website that this is no longer applicable. Even after the training I feel there are so much required to actually pass the exam and get good score in the certification. The class manual is too easy and doesn’t cover edge cases so clearly isn’t sufficient. This book also goes into details of each objectives on which the exam is based.

How many questions?

There are a total of 50 questions to be answered. The questions are organized by subject areas detailed in the exam certification study guide provided by SpringSource.

Following that philosophy, here’s the distribution for Spring 3 as per Jeanne Boyarsky’s Spring 3.X Certification Experiences (http://www.selikoff.net/2010/08/20/jeannes-core-spring-3-certification-experiences/):

  • Container and test (20)
  • AOP (10)
  • JDBC (3)
  • Transactions (4)
  • Web (2)
  • REST (2)
  • Remoting  (2)
  • Security (2)
  • JMS (2)
  • JMX (2)

How much time do I get to write this exam?

You get total of 90 minutes to complete the exam, even reading the rules. Most people wont find this a problem, because usually these are not tricky, long or complicated.

How are the questions like?

The questions are aimed at testing the candidate’s depth and the actual working knowledge in Spring Framework. Each question has four answer choices. Even though it is multiple choices, it cannot be thought that you need to choose only one right answer. Answering a question makes the type of questions as follows:-

  • Select one answer
  • Select X answers
  • Select one or more answers (Very hard and tricky)
  • Select the one that is not correct (make sure that you read the question carefully to fall into wrong selection)

Most of the questions are fairly at a high level with few detailed ones. Usually it doesn’t stray from the course or study guide.

How many questions do I have to answer correctly?

The passing score for the exam is 76%. This boils down to 38 correct answers out of 50 questions. At the time of writing this book, all questions were equally scored, so 38/50 would give you the passing score for the exam.

How much does it cost?

In the case of Spring Certification it’s very tricky. As mentioned earlier the pre-requisites for taking this exam is training from SpringSource on Core Spring. According to various factors this can change. So it will not be a good idea to give an exact figure for the certification exam. If you have taken the training you get a voucher containing one free attempt at the certification test. Retakes are usually $150, I think that would be one of the reasons you need this book.

How can I register for the exam?

Once you get the exam voucher, you can register at any certified spring certification center. The exam can be taken at one of over 4500 world-wide testing facilities (http://www.pearsonvue.com/springsource/).

Exam resources available

You can get various resources which will be of help to you in the spring certification guide (http://www.springsource.com/files/core-spring-3.0-certification-study-guide_0.pdf) itself. Some very good links and resource locations are given below:

Spring Certification Path

SpringCertification

Figure 1 SpringSource Developer Certification Path

Page Visitors: 14526

Spring and Hibernate Example

The beauty of Spring is that it can integrates well with most of the prevailing popular technologies, and in the case of ORM, it integrates well with Hibernate.

I have written a Spring Book and in Chapter 8 i explain Spring’s Data Access capabilities in detail. There is separate topics written on ORM integration and this specific heading namely “Spring and Hibernate” is dedicated for explaining this beautiful integration between two open-source framework.

Please visit Page 9 in Chapter 8 of my Spring Book for more details on the same.

This section of the chapter examines the means by which Spring can be integrated with Hibernate. I assume that the reader is somewhat familiar with Hibernate and by reading this far familiar with Spring Framework as well to some extend.

ORM is a piece of software/product for the representation and conversion of data between the database and the object-oriented programming language. Hibernate is a powerful technology for persisting data and is a clear winner in the ORM race as of now. However it hasn’t become a standard. It takes much of the database related boiler-plate code from the developers, thereby asking the developers to concentrate on the core business logic of the application and not with the error-prone SQL syntax. It also enables application to access data from any database in a platform-independent manner.

One of the problems with using Hibernate is that the client Application that accesses the database using Hibernate Framework has to depend on the Hibernate APIs. These objects will continue to get scattered across the code throughout the Application. Above all, the application code has to manually maintain and manage these objects. Here comes Spring to the rescue with its IoC container capable of configuring these objects using Spring configurations.

 

Page Visitors: 570

Spring Book – Chapter 18 – Remoting

Fundamentally Spring remoting is a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) feature which uses a communication protocol like RMI, HTTP or JMS, to inter-operate across multiple JVM’s. The plumbing involved in actually talking to one another using these protocols and other complexities are hidden away from the developer by employing a proxy object created by Spring.

In this Chapter, we will first go through the basic concepts in remoting and then go on to the support provided by Spring. We will then go on in detail to cover the various remoting technologies which Spring supports in detail.

Basic Concepts

This section provides standard definitions for the basic concepts and terminologies that will be used throughout to explain Spring remoting in detail.

Remote Procedure Call (RPC)

A remote procedure call (RPC) is an inter-process communication that allows a computer program to cause a subroutine or procedure to execute in another address space (commonly on another computer on a shared network) without the programmer explicitly coding the details for this remote interaction.

– wikipedia.org

Remote Method Invocation (RMI)

Java Remote Method Invocation (Java RMI) enables the programmer to create distributed Java technology-based to Java technology-based applications, in which the methods of remote Java objects can be invoked from other Java virtual machines*, possibly on different hosts. RMI uses object serialization to marshal and unmarshal parameters and does not truncate types, supporting true object-oriented polymorphism.

– oracle.com

Proxy Pattern

Proxy patterns are key for gaining an understanding of Spring remoting. Figure 19-1 shows the UML diagram for the proxy software design pattern.

Figure 19-1. UML diagram of proxy software design pattern

Figure 19-1. UML diagram of proxy software design pattern

In simple terms, a Proxy object is one through which we control access to the actual object on which the functionality lies. Based on the context in which these proxy objects are used, it can be categorized into three types:

  • Virtual Proxy – If you would like to control the creation of resource intensive objects in a lazy fashion (objects will be created only when the application actually uses it for the first time to do something), the heavy objects can be put inside the proxy objects and its creation can be controlled according to the requirement of your application.
  • Remote Proxy – Used to mask the complexity in communication mechanism between remote objects. Spring remoting uses this type of proxy for abstraction.
  • Access Proxy – Used to control the access to a sensitive object by wrapping it with a proxy.
  • Smart Proxy – If you would like to provide additional functionality to the existing object, smart proxies can be created to address this in your application.

The Proxy pattern is one of the most important design patterns because it provides an alternative to extending functionality in Java using inheritance. Another alternative is object composition, where an object (proxy, now you know) forwards method calls to an enclosed object (real subject).

Problems Faced Today

Most of the remoting mechanisms provide a layer of abstraction over the transport details used for communication in a distributed environment. This locks your code to a particular programming model. In present day of application development, locking to any model is not considered a right approach especially with frameworks like Spring being around which allows non-locking integration with other third party technologies and programming models.

In the case of using Java RMI (Remote Method Invocation), your service interface has to extend the java.rmi.Remote interface and your client is forced to catch the java.rmi.RemoteException exception class. This dependency of your code to Java RMI makes your code tightly couple with this programming model. It not only locks you in, but also clutters your business logic with the remoting infrastructure hurting the principle of separation of concerns.

Any enterprise application normally will be using many applications and services that function on different platforms. When the need arise for sharing the data or functions between these existing applications, the need for remoting could arise.

Integration will remain a high priority in coming years, according to Forrester analyst Ken Vollmer, as virtually all enterprise application delivery projects require significant integration among applications, internal data sources, external trading partners, and more and more frequently, external data resources.

To answer these challenges, the main goals on which Spring Remoting was built and the advantages it brings can be summarized as below:

  • Hide plumbing code as much as possible through abstraction—Spring Remoting hides a lot of plumbing code from the developer by the use of service providers in the server side and client proxy in the client side. Due to this the code becomes cleaner and more maintainable in the longer run. Clear separation of concerns and avoiding tangling and scattering of code.
  • Remoting capability by configuring and exposing services declaratively—Spring’s abstraction uses the configuration based approach for remoting. On the server side no code change is required at all and you have the power of exposing your existing services as remote services with ease. In the client side expose remote methods from existing code. You can then use Spring’s dependency injection to wire various objects into your remote objet with ease.
  • Support for multiple protocols and handling exceptions in  a consistent way—Spring offers a consistent way of writing service exporters, and client FactoryBeans for various protocols represents the same approach and is also consistent across. It provides consistency and ease of adoption as the overall flow remains the same irrespective of remoting technology. In addition, due to this consistency, on the server side ,you have the provision of exposing the services using various protocols declaratively. In the client side it brings in easy swapping of various available protocols according to infrastructure and other considerations. It is also easy to switch between remote and local deployment by mere configuration change which is very handy during testing and actual deployment phase.

In the following sections, we will see whether Spring Framework was able to deliver their goals and in what way they allow extension to it following the Spring philosophy.

Page Visitors: 4795

Spring Book – Part IV – Enterprise Application Development

Enterprise application requires many services to realize various uses cases. These services are mandatory and form the backbone of the application in many ways. Changing business scenarios requires changing and updating these services at various changes according to demand. With Spring’s capability, this can be achieved very easily catering integration with evolving opens-source technologies and solutions.

This part of the book contains Chapters which will help you in developing enterprise application having all the required enterprise services helping you realize business use case with the help of Spring Framework.

Chapter 16, “Web Services – Spring WS”, introduces you to the Spring’s capability of supporting web services in your application. After reading through this Chapter, you will have clear idea of all the terminologies related to web services and will also have a clear idea of the support provided by Spring to create and use web services in your application.

Chapter 17, “Messaging with Spring”, will initially cover messaging concepts in some detail. Later on we will cover JMS and its components in detail. We will then deep-dive into the support provided by Spring in applying messaging to your application. We will then go through the transaction support by JMS and again what Spring has to offer in this space. Last but not the least, the Chapter concluded with introduction and Spring’s support in achieving global transactions in your application.

Chapter 18, “Remoting”, we will first go through the basic concepts in remoting and then go on to the support provided by Spring. We will then go on in detail to cover the various remoting technologies which Spring supports in detail.

Chapter 19, “Tasks and Scheduling”, initially looks into the various concepts dealing with concurrency and then looks into Java support for doing this. Later on it looks into how Spring Framework can support doing this in your application. You should also be able to configure and use Quartz in your Spring application as well have the capability of using JDK’s timer support in your application.

Chapter 20, “Spring Integration”, will help you start with Spring Integration and will aid you in achieving the various integration requirement in your application. I am sure after reading through this Chapter you will have one more weapon up your sleeves which you can use and reap benefits from its high level of integration capabilities.

Chapter 21, “Spring Batch”, similar to other chapters will introduce you to Spring Batch in a comprehensive manner. Batch operation is one among the integral parts of modern day application and Spring’s support comes in the form of Spring Batch and we will deep dive into this in all aspects possible.

Chapter 16: Web Services – Spring WS

Chapter 17: Messaging with Spring

Chapter 18: Remoting

Chapter 19: Tasks and Scheduling

Chapter 20: Spring Integration

Chapter 21: Spring Batch

Page Visitors: 645

Technology stack for a web application (2013) – Part II

As I speak/write the blog is kept on updating with the reasons on the choice of various technologies/framework. Please look into the blog for more updates. Please look into the first part of this blog in here.

Web/Client Tier

  1. Spring MVC (Web Framework) – Here any good web application framework can be used. Even good component based framework like JSF is also a good choice, especially JSF implementation namely RichFaces. Once you use any of the component based framework, the level of control you have on the overall final HTML generated as a whole is a big issue especially when the application’s performance is considered. To avoid this using a basic web framework like Spring MVC with a very good JavaScript library is a good solution according to me. Spring MVC has evolved a great deal over the period of time and in line with the Spring Framework philosophy, it allows integrating various other web technologies with ease. Also a typical web application development evolution according to me should be as follows:
    1. Get the requirements from the business
    2. Converting business requirement into meaning user story board
    3. Converting those story boards into HTML’s, most done by an expert graphic designers. usually these HTML nowadays does have some level interaction and page flows shown using the various open source JavaScript libraries like JQuery. Final menu structure, sitemap and so on is designed during this time.
    4. Once getting business confirmation, pass on the HTML’s to the Java developers for making it dynamic and functional in all nature.
      Once the developer gets these HTML’s as designed and agreed by business, if you use any of the component based web frameworks, looking at the HTML provided, it has to be designed from scratch. The developed final HTML which is required will never be achieved by the developer and this can be a big issue to the business. By using such a basic web application framework like Spring MVC will avoid this and the developer will be bale to use the HTML as given by the graphic designed and convert into a dynamic web application. The business will get the same look and feel which the graphic designer as shown and overall the project can be completed in a much shorter span of time.
  2. Thymeleaf / Apache Tiles (Templating framework instead of using JSP directly) – One of the greatest features that i see of Apache Tapestry (a web application framework, initial release, Tapestry 4 and older, before the framework rewrite) is the full use of the graphic designer supplied HTML’s by the developer’s as is and making necessary changes so as to make it dynamic in nature. Thymeleaf brings that advantage onto any web application framework and acts as the templating framework. But there is an issue using Thymeleaf along with the security compliance framework namely HDIV, down the lane I will explain this and how good is it for your web application to use HDIV to cover OWASP security requirements with ease by mere configuration. If you want to use HDIV, the next best templating framework that you can use with your web application framework is Apache Tiles. For more details on Thymeleaf please go through http://www.thymeleaf.org. For more details on Apache Tiles please go through http://tiles.apache.org.
  3. SiteMesh (Decorator – Filter for layout creation/maintenance) – Using a templating framework and layout framework might not be well accepted, but i feel if the application is developed keeping in mind to be made into product and customization in mind, using this layout framework along with a templating framework will be good overall. For more details, please visit http://www.sitemesh.org.
  4. JQuery (JS) – There are so many good JavaScript frameworks available in the market both open source and commercial, which will make developing a web application enjoyable and easy with lot of cool features out-of-box. One of the prominent and mostly used JavaScript framework available as of now is JQuery and I am no exception to go along with it for developing my web application. Its fast, small and feature-rich JavaScript library, which allows traversing,parsing and manipulating HTML document easy and straightforward with it easy to use API’s, guaranteeing support to a variety of browsers available in the market. For more detail, please visit http://jquery.com.
  5. JQuery-UI (JS) – Theming (More for productization) – JQuery UI (user interface) contains a whole lot of widgets, interactions, effects and themes which are built on top of JQuery JavaScript library. A must if you building highly interaction and rich web application. Using JQuery UI with JQuery is a natural choice and i too support this in all aspects. For more details, visit http://jqueryui.com.
  6. Dandelion datatables – Dandelion is a component of the open source web application framework Dandelion. It uses DataTables JQuery plugin to create full-featured HTML based tables. There are variety of ways by which to use the tables in your web application, easy to use, integrate and customize. Any web application requires a datatable for displaying data and nowadays the expectation out of a datatable has grown out of proportions. Using Dandelion will help you realize these to a greater extend with not much hassle. That’s the reason for me to choose this and being a JQuery plugin, makes it even an easier choice. To know more details on this, visit http://dandelion.github.io/datatables.
  7. Bootstrap (CSS) or Blueprint (CSS) – If you don’t have a graphic designer and you are told to do the graphics and design of the web application, i would suggest using either bootstrap or blueprint. These give a head start, suing which the skeleton of the web application can be built and it id designed by experts, so why use their expertise. For more details on bootstrap, please visit http://getbootstrap.com. For more details on blueprint, please visit http://www.blueprintcss.org. As the project name suggests, bootstrap gives you the head start and blueprint give you the blueprint on which to bild you web application. It inherently takes care of many things for you, on such example is browser compatibility and graceful degradation.
  8. D3 JS or Highcharts JS – Both are fabulous charting framework. Both are really good in features and if you application is chart/report oriented, not using any one of them is a crime. D3 can be used for commercial projects for free but Highcharts can only be used freely for non-commercial projects. Since these are JS based libraries, usage is easy and wouldn’t be that troublesome. Highcharts being a commercial products boasts good support and browser compatibility and as its a de-facto requirement, supports graceful degradation according to the browser in which you web application is rendering.
  9. Modernizr (Browser detection and grace degradation in case you are using HTML5 and CSS3) – If your application is based on HTML5 and CSS3 standards, using this JS would be handy so that the web application can degrade gracefully according to the browser in which the application is loading. For more details, visit http://modernizr.com.
  10. HDIV (HTTP Data Integrity Validator) – Good things come later, isn’t? To me one of the best Java Web application security framework. Integrates well with major web application framework and templating frameworks. Just by using this framework, you automatically get your web application security requirement covered to a good level. The framework takes care of almost all the top 10 security threats as classified by OWASP. It gives you this feature by not tampering with your pages by your developers, rather it sits as a filter (highly configurable), and takes care of all without a single line written in your main application code. At any point, if you feel that this is not doing any justice to your web application, removing it can be done very easily. Its a wonderful handy framework which you can use to get past your company’s security team (VAPT). For more details, please visit http://hdiv.org.
  11. yepnope.js (Script/resource loader) – Now your application has good amount of JavaScript library and slowly your application’s client side is becoming heavier and clunkier. You definitely need a conditional resource loader. Out of various resource loaders available in market, I consider using either of these. yepnope JS (cool, innovative and apt name) is an asynchronous conditional resource loader which allows you to load what scripts you want in your application. Its not only light-weight but super-fast. For more details, visit http://yepnopejs.com. These script loaders will surely improve your performance and will also reduce your page’s load time.
  12. backbone.js – You now really have good amount of JS libraries and maintenence of these can be cumbersome if your web applications keeps growing in size over a period of time. This JS library brings structure to the JS coding as a whole and this can be really helpful in case of big coporate web application. For more details, visit http://backbonejs.org.
  13. Custom tags – Custom tags must be written and used as much as possible bringing in component based development in case you plan to use Spring MVC as your choice of web application framework.

Exhausted. I will be completing my three part series in my following blog post. In couple of days and you will see my final blog. Having said that I will keep updating the earlier blog parts with more and more detail, especially when i get more details from my fellow bloggers/readers.

Page Visitors: 2201

Technology stack for a web application (2013) – Part I

This is an opinionated blog as I do favor considering Spring Framework in the various tiers of a typical web application. I consider the framework because of its features, ease and above all good enthusiastic community and activity surrounding it as a whole. While doing this evaluation and recommendation, I have put the year, as technology changes are so fast, obsolesce is down the lane and I do want to make sure that it is reviewed in a timely manner so that rather than giving a wrong recommendation, make recommendation to some extent useful and ideal for a typical web application. The whole technology stack can be summarized as below:

Web/Client Tier

  1. Spring MVC (Web Framework)
  2. Thymeleaf / Apache Tiles (View framework instead of using JSP directly)
  3. SiteMesh (Decorator – Filter for layout creation/maintenance)
  4. JQuery (JS)
  5. JQuery-UI (JS) – Theming (More for productization)
  6. Dandelion (For datatables) – JSF datatables are heavy
  7. Bootstrap (CSS) or Blueprint (CSS)
  8. D3.js – for graph representations
  9. Modernizr (Browser detection and grace degradation in case you are using HTML5 and CSS3)
  10. HDIV – to tick all security requirements in your application from a single point. At this point in time, using Spring MVC along with Thymeleaf is not supported by HDIV, but its not far away. So if you want to use HDIV, Spring MVC along with Apache Tiles should be used.
  11. yepnope.js (Script/resource loader)
  12. backbone.js
  13. Custom tags will be written and used as much as possible bringing in component based development

Server Tier

  1. Spring Framework
  2. Consider using Spring Data – Different profiles

Things to be considered as a whole:

  • WebJars for managing JS and CSS libraries as jars
  • Caching using Ehcache
  • Multiple DB support (development can be even considered using in-memory database)
  • Consider using Datatables4J
  • Reason for each technology/framework selection

As detailed earlier, the reasons that I consider might be fully opinionated/biased, please let me know your suggestions, after careful consideration looking at its advantages/disadvantages, the technology stack will be considered and changed accordingly. For the year 2013, I consider this blog as evolving as possible according to the suggestions that I get from the readers of www.javacodebook.com.

I will have another blog written very soon (2 days’ time) giving the reasons for each choice which I made so that while you do a selection in your project, you do have enough reasons and points to be given to your management.

Please visit Part II of this blog in here.

Page Visitors: 952