Spring and Struts or Tapestry or ... whats the right combination

[Emman lopez]

Hi,
I see Spring is flexible , you can use with its own framework, or with struts, or tapestry. I wonder if the book "Spring Live" written by the mighty Matt Raible, (seriously I dont know where you get all the energy to do so many stuff, but I glad you do Matt) talks about a set of standard or rules for choosing the right combination for the given scenario. For example like if you are starting a project what combination to use, or scenarios when the projects are working with struts, or working with ejbs, or if you have a db with millions of data, etc.

[Alexandru Popescu]

You mean that Matt is analysing various scenarios and suggest solutions for these?

./pope

[Per Dahlberg]

Was just wondering the same thing as you Emman. Going to start evaluating Spring and Tapestry next week, or the week afer that. So I'm very interested in this.

[Karthik Guru]

I would'nt 'expect' matt to do the analysis in a Spring book.
But Art of Java Web Development should have something. Again am not sure since I have not read the book. But from the description it looks like they build the same app using different frameworks.

[Matt Raible]

Originally posted by Emman lopez:
Hi,
I see Spring is flexible , you can use with its own framework, or with struts, or tapestry. I wonder if the book "Spring Live" written by the mighty Matt Raible, talks about a set of standard or rules for choosing the right combination for the given scenario. For example like if you are starting a project what combination to use, or scenarios when the projects are working with struts, or working with ejbs, or if you have a db with millions of data, etc.

My general rule for choosing a web application framework is "choose the one you are most efficient with". If you choose any of the top 5 (Struts, Spring, WebWork, Tapestry or JSF) - you've already made a wise choice. From there, it's just about finishing your project and getting code out the door.

I like the other frameworks a bit more than Struts because I can use POJOs in my view, but AppFuse gets around this by generating the ActionForms at build time with XDoclet. I wouldn't develop a Struts app w/o AppFuse. ;-)

I'll be comparing the big 5 frameworks in Vegas next month and I'll try to the slides when I'm done.

Chapter 12 (due to be published at the beginning of next year) will contain an in-depth howto for implementing these frameworks with a Spring middle-tier. I probably won't do much recommending though since this is often a religious war b/w developers.

To support the talk, I'll be adding support for all 5 frameworks to Equinox. AppFuse already supports Struts, Spring and WebWork and I plan on adding Tapestry and JSF support by the end of the year.