Jeanne Boyarski,
Thanks for your response.
I was thinking in particular of the front end, although I'm not opposed to swapping around the middle layer if the productivity gains and ease of understanding and fixing bugs is worthwhile. If I'm remembering the division of labor between the pieces of MVC correctly, Struts 1.x is the view using
JSP and JSTL, of course. Hibernate is our model - it works fantastically well, but the Hibernate layer of the application was written by someone who left before I got to the company four years ago, and I had to teach myself Hibernate, configuration, HQL, the Criteria API, proxy objects, and how to debug and fix lazy instantiation errors, multiple instances of the same object in the session, and so forth. (Maybe I'm stupid, but that was a hell of a learning curve even with the Hibernate forums and books on the subject.) The Control layer has a lot of pieces but is relatively simplistic, consisting mostly of a horde of Simple Factories (Design
Pattern). It works and it's easy to understand, but it's slow to develop.
Craig Walls,
Thanks for your response.
I appreciate that you can't make the decision for me. I was mostly interested in what other products you used before deciding Spring MVC was a top choice. If you had responded that you've never used the others, I would be less inclined to trust your belief that Spring is worthwhile. I mean no disrespect with that statement.
I won't decide to use Spring because of your statement, but it definitely puts Spring - and your book - into the "worth investigating" category. Again, I work at a small company, three developers, one monolithic Struts 1.x application with about 75 mapped actions and a similar number of underlying tables in a Postgres database. Any migration we do would have to be piecemeal over a long period, and the new framework would have to be intuitive and useful enough that it would be worthwhile to run it alongside and intermingled with Struts 1.x.