Springy developers choose DWR

[Ray Davis]

Had a feeling I'd be hearing from you on this one, Antranig!  :)  I 
hope I can get a chance for a Real Life compare-and-contrast of the 
two approaches sometime soon. As a naive consumer of propaganda from 
both sides, I should keep my mouth shut till I get my hands dirty....

I'd gotten the impression that Spring Web Flow developers were 
generally a happy lot, so I had been wondering what was up with the 
RSF integration. On paper, they do seem complementary. I admit, 
though, it's been a while since anyone's done programming on paper.

BTW, DWR + Spring configuration is another thing that seems to have 
improved in DWR recently (not too surprising, given the Spring 
opinions I cited). You might want to give it another look.

Ray

At 03:26 PM 4/2/2007, Antranig Basman wrote:
>Hi there Ray - we meet again, at 50,000 feet :P
>
>DWR is fun, although I have to mention (to blow own trumpet, when 
>did anything else)
>that we have our homegrown distillation of the technique in the form of RSF's
>"Universal View Bus" which I feel is much less intrusive since it functions
>with no config files other than Spring ones (no dwr.xml), and similarly no
>extra Java-side artefacts since it just uses the existing 
>application structure.
>
>Spring Web Flow seems like a winner on paper, but every developer I've exposed
>it to in practice becomes highly annoyed. I feel their conception of 
>"flows" is
>too restrictive and "top-heavy" (OGNL-driven, and with a meaty RequestContext
>object at the other side) to be truly idiomatically portable. I made an
>experimental integration with RSF in the very early days but has languished
>for lack of interest.
>
>Filesystem-previewable templates with behaviour are indeed a reality 
>already :P
>
>
>
>Ray Davis wrote:
> >
> > DWR = Direct Web Remoting - https://dwr.dev.java.net/
> >
> > This looks like magic, and it's being used in production in some
> > products (including JIRA and Confluence), but I hadn't heard of it
> > until I read this transcription of a talk Bram Smeets gave on "Ajax
> > with the Spring Framework":
> >
> > http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=44657
> >
> > Going over ideas similar to Josh's, he recommends JSON-RPC if you
> > want an RPC approach, but recommends DWR even more strongly for
> > server-client glue.
> >
> > And then I bumped into this, from the lead of Spring Web Flow:
> >
> > http://www.infoq.com/news/2006/12/wicket-vs-springmvc-and-jsf#view_4214
> >
> > "In summary a development team evaluating Spring's web app
> > development stack should consider Spring MVC + Web Flow + DWR
> > together, and not simply the Spring MVC base in isolation."
> >
> > (I look forward to seeing how much of Spring MVC we could eliminate
> > from that combination.)
> >
> > The DWR 2 preview examples are getting to a spot in which we could
> > create fully interactive browser-only (no server) prototypes
> > populated with test data by JavaScript. And then after some initial
> > user testing's been done, we could replace the JavaScript-loaded test
> > data bit by bit with dynamic server-based data without touching the
> > "prototype's" XHTML or CSS.... Specifications which double as
> > production code. It's a nice dream.