One common criticism of my Spring to Java EE Migration article series (see part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4) is that the article uses an old version of Spring against a modern version of Java EE. There's a reason for that, since project using older versions of Spring are the most likely ones to be looking to migrate to a newer technology stack, be it a newer version of the Spring Framework, Java EE or something else.
Nevertheless, truth be told, I've been focusing on Java EE projects for the last few years, and the times I've used Spring have been when maintaining legacy applications that don't use modern versions of the Spring framework.
Trying to keep an open mind, I bought Just Spring by Madhusudhan Konda for my Kindle Fire. The book uses Spring 3.0, versus Spring 2.5 in my article series. I decided to go for this book since it is a quick read (just over 60 pages), I didn't want to have to go through a 300+ behemoth of a book just to see if my opinion of Spring was outdated.
Quite frankly, the book did little to change my opinion in the Java EE vs Spring debacle. Although annotations get a brief mention in Konda's book, most of the examples still use XML configuration, and the seemingly endless XML needed to do anything nontrivial in Spring is one of the main reasons I'm not a fan of the framework.
To learn more about Java EE development, please check out my own books, Java EE 6 with GlassFish 3 Application Server and Java EE 6 Development with NetBeans 7.
My comment is actually about a different Java topic. You wrote an article back in 2005 about how to create an Eclipse project from an Ant build file. Here it is:
http://eclipse.sys-con.com/node/100814
That article just saved me so much time as I work to hit a deadline this week. Thanks! Seven years later and it is still having an impact.
(I put this feedback here because I couldn't figure out how else to get it to you.)
Posted by Carl Parker on May 14, 2012 at 09:43 PM EDT #
I was planning to port PetClinic to Java EE myself when I came across your articles.
All that seems to be missing from this very detailed account of what you did is a download link for the ported code.
Could you publish the code on GitHub or anywhere else?
Regarding Spring, with Spring 3.1 you can actually work without any XML configuration. So Spring is now much less verbose than it used to be.
But there are still plenty of reasons to prefer Java EE - see http://hwellmann.blogspot.de/2012/05/deconstructing-spring-myths.html
Posted by Harald Wellmann on May 15, 2012 at 05:54 AM EDT #
@Carl Wow that was a long time ago. A new version of Eclipse had just been released and that was one of the new features.
Glad to hear you found it useful.
As you can see NetBeans is now my preferred Java IDE so I don't write much about Eclipse anymore.
Posted by David Heffelfinger on May 15, 2012 at 06:06 AM EDT #
@Harald
I'll contact the folks at OTN to see if they we can publish a download link for the sample code.
Posted by David Heffelfinger on May 15, 2012 at 06:07 AM EDT #
The example code can be downloaded at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/java/petclinicjavaee-1356466.zip
David
Posted by David Heffelfinger on May 15, 2012 at 03:22 PM EDT #