In a new article, now up on otn/java, titled “Spring to Java EE Migration, Part 4,” David Heffelfinger presents the final part of his series in which he demonstrates the ease of migration from the Spring Framework to Java EE. Here he compares equivalent functionality in Java EE and Spring in areas such as MVC design pattern implementation, data access, transaction management, and dependency injection.

He concludes the series with these remarks:

“In this series of articles, we developed a Java EE version of Spring’s Pet Clinic application. We saw how the advanced tooling provided by NetBeans enables us to quickly develop a Java EE application…. Once we were done building the Java EE version of the application, we compared it with the Spring version, noting that the original version has several dependencies whereas the Java EE version has none, because it takes advantage of all the services provided by the Java EE application server.

Finally, we compared how to implement similar functionality such as MVC and DAO implementation, transaction management, and dependency injection with Spring and Java EE. In every case with Spring, some XML configuration needs to be done besides adding annotations to the code. Java EE relies on convention, and in most cases, no XML configuration is needed in order to implement these services.

Although newer versions of Spring rely a lot less on explicit XML configuration than earlier versions, there are always a few little lines here and there that we need to add to an XML configuration file in order to get most of the Spring annotations to work, violating the DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principle...

Additionally, Spring applications tend to have several dependencies, because they are meant to run in a “lightweight” Servlet container such as Tomcat or Jetty and these containers don’t provide all the required functionality. In contrast, Java EE applications are meant to be deployed in a full-blown Java EE 6 application server such as Oracle GlassFish Server...

For these reasons, I always recommend Java EE over Spring for enterprise application development.”

Have a look at the article here.

In a new tech article up on otn/java, adapted from a series of innovative blog postings, Downstream's Senior Java Architect Daniel Zwolenski develops ways to build apps in JavaFX 2.0 -- from Spring to controller injection to client servers. The article is derived from several blogs wherein he explores ways to create applications in JavaFX 2.0, building upon a direct port of Oracle Chief Client Java Architect Richard Bair’s FXML+Guice dependency injection example into Spring.

As Zwolenski says, “Many developers still believe that Spring is all about XML configuration files, but it has evolved a lot since the early days. I’m going to use Spring’s annotation-based configuration to create a pure Java example (i.e., zero Spring XML) that looks almost identical to the Guice one.”

Zwolenski is the creator of JFX Flow which he describes as, “a free, open source framework for developing rich, interactive and user friendly web-style GUIs for desktops using JavaFX (2.0+). JFX Flow combines the powerful feature set of JavaFX (styling, animations, FXML, etc.) with a simple ‘web flow’ style framework that is easy to use and that fosters clean architectural patterns, especially when developing Java EE applications. JFX Flow is currently in Alpha release and may still have some bugs. The core framework is usable however, and the API is quite stable.”

Read the complete article here.

Vikram Goyal’s article, “Working with the XML Parser API — JSR 172,” now up on otn/java, covers the basics of the XML Parsing API via a concrete example that uses SAX (Simple API for XML), a parsing method which is now preferred to the alternative method, and DOM (Document Object Model), which has a heavy memory footprint that led the XML Parser API to disallow its use in XML processing. “The XML Parser API,” explains Goyal, “defines the use of the SAX parser for parsing XML documents in resource-constrained devices.”

 

He explains through a working example what the SAX parser is, how it is defined by the API, and how best to use it.

 

From the article:

 

“In a nutshell, for the parsing of a custom XML document, you need to create a handler that extends the DefaultHandler class provided by the API. This custom handler is responsible for listening to the events from the parser and creating the model based on those events (and the supplied data). Your handler is responsible for validating the document and its data.”

 

Read the article.