Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow (Expert's Voice in Java) [Tapa blanda]

Other reviews have mentioned that there are many problems with the examples in this book. I can only reaffirm what they've said.

The other thing that I really didn't like was the disorganized fashion with which the examples were presented. The authors seemed to jump around describing one small section of the problem in great detail, then 3-4 pages later would give you the critical piece of information you needed to understand their example 3 pages before. I am a fan of examples that are logically presented:
First you do x,
Then you do y,
you configure x to point to y
now deploy it, type this in the url field, and there you go, it works.

I found these examples to be more like:
First you do x,
then let me tell you everything there is to know about x.
y is very important as well.
if you wanted to set up y you could do it like this.
of another popular way of configuring y is like this.
and then there's this thing called z.
z is also very important, and here's some more information about z.
But of course, before we can set up z, we need to configure x to point to y.
I'm sure you can figure out how to configure x and y.
that's it, we're done.

So when you're done reading you feel like you have increased your general knowledge of the subject, but you really don't know exactly what you're supposed to do to actually make something that works.

I also would have liked more information about using commons-validator with Spring MVC instead of so much detail on VaLang. This would have been especially helpful for people moving from Struts to Spring MVC.

Those are the negative aspects of the book. On a positive note, it is fairly well written. There is a lot of good information that will increase your general understanding of the MVC and WebFlow frameworks. I do use this book as a reference from time to time, and it has provided me some value in that respect.

Overall though, I do not recommend purchasing this book. I think you can get a better idea of the WebFlow framework just by using the documentation on Spring's website, downloading the framework and walking through the examples. As far as MVC I think this book is better in the MVC chapters than it is in the WebFlow chapters, but with the release of Spring 2.0 even those chapters are now out of date.

What is this book about?

Today, an abundance of MVC frameworks - each with its own pros and cons - plague a web-developers decision to choose one. Out of them, frameworks like Struts, Webwork and Maverick are deemed as request-driven frameworks, where as JSF and Tapestry are deemed as component-driven frameworks. Request-Driven broadly means, that the framework does not hide the HTTP-ness of the web world, but provides absractions that can simplify your job to handle them. Component-Driven means, that the web-framework seeks to hide the HTTP-ness, and provides the developer with an abstraction equivalent to Swing programming. Both types of frameworks have their own advantages and disadvantages. Spring MVC falls into the request-driven web frameworks category.

In my career, i have worked with many web frameworks. Out of all of them, i prefer Spring MVC for the following reasons

1. It has access to the full power of the Spring IoC and AOP container.

2. It is very well architected and brings true seperation of model, view and controller better than any other framework out there.

3. It is highly customizable.

4. It is interface driven, and doesnt force you to extend any framework classes.

5. It is easily testable - both unit and integration tests.

6. It helps apply good OO principles to the web-tier.

7. It provides easy-to-use template implementations of basic workflows.

8. It provides support for various view types(JSP, Velocity, Freemarker, etc) and completely decouples this support from other parts of the MVC.

9. It provides an exhaustive set of interface based hooks that one can customize or freshly implement for their own purposes.

10.And many more...

The above list is by no means exhaustive. So, i sincerely suggest to consider this framework if you are researching on an MVC implementation for your next project.

This book is all about Spring MVC and a sub-project called Spring Web Flow (SWF). Now, that you know what Spring MVC is, and where it fits into the plethora of available web-frameworks, you might be wondering what SWF is. Is it yet another web-framework that Spring supports? Is it a seperate implementation of Spring MVC? Is it something else? These kind of questions might come up, and i had all these questions in mind when spring announced SWF.

Anyways, SWF attacks a different problem. It is a seperate and self-contained framework, where you can define flows. Each flow is potentially a conversation between the user and the server over multiple pages and requests. The flows can be defined declaratively, and integrated with the MVC framework of your choice for execution. Spring MVC, Struts, JSF, Portlet MVC are supported out-of-the-box, but it is easy to implement an integration for your favorite framework.

How this book does it?

There are quite a few spring framework books around, that covers the entire framework. Sadly, none of those books gives Spring MVC enough importance and coverage is decent at best. Those books are geared towards covering the IoC and AOP features in-depth and finally when the book reaches the MVC section, they just breeze past it, not giving us enough practical ways to use it.

That is where this book comes in. This book takes from where other spring books leave and covers the entire Spring MVC framework in-depth. The author's writing skill is fabulous. You will be turning pages, before you even know. Typically, when you learn a new topic, you dont want to get into the details out-right. You want a complete mental picture first, then dive into details. That is exactly what the author does. He takes a topic and explains the overall picture in a couple of paragraphs. This first gives you the idea and scope of that topic. Then the author revisits the topic to explain it in depth with examples. I liked this approach very much. Trust me, I have read many spring books before, this one covering Spring MVC the best.

That said, this book is not for developers who are not familiar with spring. You should know Spring's IoC container, AOP, and other basic features before you can make sense out of this book. The author devotes one full chapter to provide a brief introduction to spring. That may be enough, but to be really confident, it is better if you first learn spring. I would suggest Pro Spring for that. Read my "Pro Spring" review for more information.

I completely agree with the reviewer who points out how almost chaotically the information is delivered in this book - for the most part. Generally, you need to skip from section to section and back a few times before you can get all the pieces together. That's unacceptable. It's impossible to use this book as a convenient reference since each example generally provides only partial answers, and you have to scan back and forth through the pages to look for the clarification on the missing pieces. Often, the coverage is quite superficial. The official Spring Reference Guide on the Spring site does not get into too much detail on Spring MVC, leaving out lots of important and interesting details. Nevertheless, much more - and better - information is indeed available on-line today - at no cost. I haven't yet seen a perfect one-stop source for Spring MVC, but this book is definitely a waste of money. It may have been okay a couple of years ago when much less info was available online, but certainly not today.

The only part of this book that is very well written is the chapters on Spring Web Flow. Indeed, it appears that the chapters were written by someone other than the authors of the rest of the book. Someone who understood and appreciated the importance of a very thoughtfully organized FLOW of any sequence of logical steps, be it a software application, or a flow of information such as an instructions manual, or a tutorial. That's why Colin Yates, the apparent main contributor to Chapters 11 and 12 (on Spring Web Flow), does a much better job than the rest of the authors. Unfortunately, those Web Flow chapters are largely obsolete today. Some code in the book won't work. You'll immediately see that the classes in the org.springframework.webflow.test package you get with your latest Webflow distribution differ from the ones used in the book's examples. What's even worse is that the flow configuration XML files in the examples apparently use the old/obsolete XML schema. That means you shouldn't use them as examples for your own code. Just compare the code from the latest Spring [on-line] Reference Guide and the examples in the book and you will instantly see the difference.

For a very good introduction to Spring Web Flow, see the Spring Reference Guide ([...]) and the article by the author of Spring Web Flow at [...] which is excellent.

Do not waste money on this book! Honestly. ;)