SoftwareEngineering

The discussion whether or not to use Spring vs. Java EE for new enterprise Java applications is a no-brainer

Why migrate?

since then fallen a prey to the hungry minds of Venture Capitalists and finally into the hands of a virtualization company called VMware

While the different companies and individuals behind the Spring framework have been doing some work in the JCP their voting behavior on important JSRs is peculiar to say the least

outdated ORM solution like JDBC templates

some developers completely stopped looking at new developments in the Java EE space and might have lost track of the current state of technology

size of the deployment archive

fairly standard Java EE 6 application will take up about 100 kilobytes

comparable Spring application weighs in at a whopping 30 Megabytes!

Lightweight

Firing up the latest JBoss AS 7 Application Server from scratch and deploying a full blown Java EE 6 application into the server takes somewhere between two and five seconds on a standard machine. This is in the same league as a Tomcat / Spring combo

Dependency injection

Java EE 6, the Context and Dependency Injection (CDI) specification was introduced to the Java platform, which has a very powerful contextual DI model adding extensibility of injectable enterprise services

Aspect Oriented Programming

“AOP Light” and this is exactly what Java EE Interceptors do

common pitfall when taking AOP too far is that your code might end up all asymmetric and unreadable. This is due to the fact that the aspect and its implementation are not in the same place. Determining what a piece of code will do at runtime at a glance will be really hard

Testing

With Arquillian we can get rid of mocking frameworks and test Java EE components in their natural environment

Tooling

capabilities comparison matrix below to map Spring’s technology to that of Java EE

Capability Spring JavaEE Dependency Injection Spring Container CDI Transactions AOP / annotations EJB Web framework Spring Web MVC JSF AOP AspectJ (limited to Spring beans) Interceptors Messaging JMS JMS / CDI Data Access JDBC templates / other ORM / JPA JPA RESTful Web Services Spring Web MVC (3.0) JAX-RS Integration testing Spring Test framework Arquillian *

how to perform integration tests of you Java EE 6 application using Arquillian

for GraniteDS users keeping their Java domain model and ActionScript3 domain model in sync via Gas3, the constraints are kept in sync

a couple of gotchas to be aware of

the constraint implementation is in the same class as the constraint declaration (not a problem in a dynamic language) @Pattern has a sightly different semantic because the regexp engine in Flex is a bit different. instead of the features provided by ConstraintValidatorContext, you can define a properties attribute in your constraints to make it belong to several sub-properties. not as flexible but good enough in many cases.

Extract/replace AMF data during the test in order to variabilize the calls

Automatically handle the session IDs used by AMF

JSR-303 (“Bean Validation”) ActionScript3 framework for form validation

validation framework is a specific adaptation of the JSR-303 (Bean Validation) specification to Flex: like its Java counterpart, it relies on validation annotations placed on bean properties and provides an engine API that lets you validate your forms without writing by hand a specific validator for each of your input fields

code generation tools provided by GraniteDS so that when you write your Java entity bean with validation annotations, they are automatically replicated in your ActionScript3 beans

problem with LCDS is mainly that it promotes a strict “client / server” architecture, with – roughly speaking – a heavy Flex client application connected to a server almost reduced to a database frontend

big majority of  these organizations use BlazeDS, a free and open-source subset of LCDS

need more advanced mechanisms than just Remoting start looking for open-source libraries to enable deeper integrations with the Java business layer, and GraniteDS is for sure the most popular project

“Flex Data Services” (now renamed to “Live Cycle Data Services”)

Flex Data Services seemed too “client-centric”