Shaun Abram
Technology and Leadership Blog
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There is no right answer to the question of what is the best Java web framework. Still I end up asking it to myself every time a new project crops up. I did a post on a related talk I saw at JavaOne last year, which provoked a lot of debate and some really interesting responses. More recently, this report from Zero Turnaround is useful and this comparison from Matt Raible is also well written.
I have also been swayed in the past by the Thoughtworks technology radar in which component based frameworks (which, I think, in the Java world includes JSF, Wicket and Tapestry) get a thumbs down e.g. see the May 2013 radar. GWT has also in the past (see July 2011 radar) been singled out as something to avoid. Presumably Vaadin falls in to the same ‘hold’ category. Full disclosure, I’ve had limited exposure to these types of frameworks personally though.
My own preference remains Spring MVC. It is relatively easy to setup (especially with Spring Boot), provides decent testing support, and obviously integrates well with the rest of the Spring ecosystem. I am admittedly biased due to already knowing Spring core, but so be it.
My recent, albeit limited, experience with Struts2 is that I have been fairly pleasantly surprised. It wasn’t as bad I was expecting! The Action classes, which are instantiated for each request, and hence threadsafe, are fairly easy to use and test. I am not so fond of the xml mappings and the variable passing that gets done there though. It seems kind of clunky, although there may be a better way I am not aware off.
Still, I am not likely to start using Struts by choice on my own projects anytime soon. Spring MVC remains my go-to web framework.
Tags: springmvc, struts, struts2, webframework
Handsontable ‘Spreadsheet’ talking to SpringMVC
Handsontable is an Excel-like data grid utilizing JQuery. For example, it provides the ability to copy and paste directly to & from Excel. Handsontable itself if very easy to setup. The part I struggled with was passing the data to SpringMVC. So, this post shows how to send data from a Handsontable data grid on the client to a SpringMVC server.
Tags: excel, handsontable, JavaScript, jQuery, jsp, spreadsheet, spring, springmvc
SpringMVC file download
This post shows how to download a file using Spring MVC. For example, you have a SpringMVC web app and you want to include a link on a page that downloads a file to be opened on the user’s machine (e.g. a Microsoft Excel).
Read more
MyMoney – A simple SpringMVC app
I created a small, open source web app called MyMoney for entering and tracking spending details. It allows you to create accounts (for example Cash or Checking) and enter transactions associated with those accounts.
(Previously I had the code deployed on a CloudBees instance at http://mymoney.shaunabram.cloudbees.net, but CloudBees have since unfortunately shut down their free tier). Read more
Tags: Hibernate, spring, springmvc
415 ‘Unsupported Media Type’ error when submitting JSON from a JSP
I’ve been experimenting with submitting JSON data from a JSP to a Spring MVC Controller, using the Spring MVC Ajax example as my guide.
But after setting everything up, I continually ran into this error:
NetworkError: 415 Unsupported Media Type
The server refused this request because the request entity is in a format not supported by the requested resource for the requested method().
After much googling, I found a plethora of solutions, none of which worked for me. In the end, I found it was because I had omitted this line from my JSP:
">Hope that helps someone else…
Tags: json, jsp, spring, springmvc
Spring MVC Hello World with Continuous Deployment
Oh dear, yet another ‘Hello World!’. But although the functionality is trivial, this little SpringMVC project is complete enough for me to use as a template to bootstrap more complex projects. It consists of:
- HTML/JSP client
- SpringMVC server using a Controller/Service/DAO design
- Maven for build and dependency management
This is an updated version of an older project I created, with the following enhancements:
- Added a full suite of automated tests (unit, integration and browser based)
- Added placeholders for JavaScript and images (both can be a little tricky to put in the correct place with SpringMVC)
- Incorporated into a continuous deployment environment
More details below, but you can find the full source code on this GitHub repository
(Previously I had the code deployed on a CloudBees instance at http://springmvc.shaunabram.cloudbees.net, but CloudBees have since unfortunately shut down their free tier).
Tags: cloud, cloudbees, continuousdeployment, continuousintegration, easymock, fest, helloworld, jenkins, spring, springmvc, Testing, unittesting
Spring MVC Hello World
There is a good Getting Started with Spring MVC blog post over on the Spring team blog.
I have created several Spring MVC projects for both work and play, and am attaching my own simple version of the HelloWorld example here, based on the Spring blog example.
Find my maven ready source here.
Like my previous JSP/Servlet example, I find these templates useful for getting prototypes up and running.
Tags: helloworld, jsp, servlet, spring, springmvc, webapp, webframework