I am still a bit on the fence about campaigning against Spring. I think there is far more to be gained from promoting CDI, Weld Extension, Seam 3 and the EE 6 profile (with positive messages), than jumping into a debate with gung-ho Spring believers. From what I saw in my consulting engagements people who used Spring for a while are stuck in a specific mindset of application development. For them anything beyond singleton bean wiring on app startup does not exist or is too mysterious or scary. Yes, it does sound funny, but I once had the same mindset, but I saw the light ;). I converted to Seam thanks to so many examples and great books like Dan's Seam in Action.

So if our goal is to entice the "not-yet-lost" souls, then we have to send more messages that are pro-Weld, and not necessarily against Spring. How to do it? In a few ways. First, excellent and exhaustive documentation. I think Gavin, Pete, Dan and the community has done an awesome job in that arena, and have set a golden standard. Second - example projects. I think nothing shows the prowess of a technology stack than a real proof that it works, works well, integrates with other key technologies (JSF2, JPA, BPM, etc), which are part of the Enterprise application ecosystem. These examples though need to go above and beyond the simple ones already out there (we need the simple ones too) - something along the lines of the Photo Album for RichFaces. Third, tutorials, articles and blog posts detailing the aforementioned examples - in another words - creating the hype and excitement about the CDI's programming model, and the ease of creating powerful apps in an elegant and concise way.

But at this point, there are still a number of important pieces missing, like the Weld extensions and Seam 3 modules, which provide integration with key technologies for business apps (i.e. BPM or Security) or complement these technologies. These are needed to create the example projects, which are essential as the meat of the article to be written about Weld and Seam.

My key goal is to build an enthusiastic community around CDI, rather than go after Spring. I think Gavin has a better handle on disproving any allegation against CDI or anything bogus about Spring. I simply don't have the technical know-how, just an implementer experience.




On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 3:39 PM, Reza Rahman <reza_rahman@lycos.com> wrote:
Piotr,

Please consider posting your comments on InfoQ...it would help a greater number of developers see past the Spring FUD...

Cheers,
Reza


Piotr Steininger wrote:
Gavin,

One thing to add to your comment is that they have done nothing to Spring Webflow, which on  the cover, promises the scopes/context that Seam 2 delivered (primarily the conversation scope). I had the misfortune of being forced to use the Spring stack on one of my engagements, after having great success with Seam on another project. I can't explain how harrowing of an effort it was to get Webflow working even remotely like Seam (in Webflow all conversation scoped beans had to be manually defined in the xml). And the docs - yes there are some, but extremely minuscule for JSF integration and absolutely NO mention of necessary JSF 1.2 configuration, which I had to figure out on my own.

I also had to make it work with Spring Security - this one is clunky and difficult to set up, no to mention buggy. Yes, the security was bumped to 3.0.0 and aligned with JSR-250, but where in the world are the docs?! There aren't any for 3.0, and the ones for 2.x aren't any better than the ones for Webflow.

As a software architect who often gets to decide the technology stack (but sometimes gets overruled :( ), I look for a complete /ecosystem/ for the application I'm designing, not just individual pieces with big promises. I need stuff that works, works well, and works together. Not only that, I look for something simple, maintainable and maintained by a strong community. And my measure of strong community is the quality of documentation and access to knowledgeable resources, without support contracts.

This is where Spring falls entire short of its promises, yet again. So my time and money are with CDI and Seam.

Thanks for your advocacy and hard work!

Piotr

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Gavin King <gavin.king@gmail.com <mailto:gavin.king@gmail.com>> wrote:

   http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/12/spring30#view_51440

   --
   Gavin King
   gavin.king@gmail.com <mailto:gavin.king@gmail.com>

   http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/Gavin
   http://hibernate.org
   http://seamframework.org
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