Any website developed using Spring?

[Basel Al-Mustafa]

Hi,

Are there any production websites that are developed using the Spring framework?

[Lasse Koskela]

Yes, probably in the thousands by now.

[Paul Christian]

I'm eager to see whether there is any Enterprise product or a site running in Spring like theserverside.com using tapestry.

Thanks and regards

[Basel Al-Mustafa]

Yes, probably in the thousands by now.

Can you list some of them? 2 or 3 that you think are well designed.

[Lasse Koskela]

Originally posted by Basel Al-Mustafa:
Can you list some of them? 2 or 3 that you think are well designed.

I know of a handful of commercial websites here in Finland that have been implemented using Spring but I'm not allowed to disclose them. Pretty much all I can say is that Accenture is using Spring Framework in some of its projects in Finland and that a small IT shop named Reaktor Innovations is rumoured to do practically all their projects with Spring, for example. Obviously this is just a small fraction of what people are doing with Spring.

[Pradeep bhatt]

Lasse,

Does Spring scale well. Could it be used for large site/projects? Thanks

[Craig Walls]

Originally posted by Basel Al-Mustafa:
Hi,

Are there any production websites that are developed using the Spring framework?

For one, www.michaels.com is largely Spring-based. We use Spring primarily as an IoC container, declarative transactions via AOP, and our DAO layer with Hibernate. We are also using Spring MVC to some degree, but we still have some legacy code from our own home-grown MVC framework in there.

Aside from that, we have several intranet and extranet applications that employ Spring to varying degrees. One of our highest traficked intranet sites is based on Spring from MVC to to DAO layer.

Our experience has been that Spring has not been a hindrance in any way regarding functionality or performance.

[Karthik Guru]

Originally posted by Pradeep Bhat:
Lasse,

Does Spring scale well. Could it be used for large site/projects? Thanks

to an extent you can find answers here and
here

Spring does'nt do anything by itself to provide scalability. I mean if an ejb is deployed in a cluster, we can get a cluster aware stub that can route the calls to a bean in any node in that cluster. Spring doesnt do anything like that but as pointed out will work with other products that provide a similar feature.

[Basel Al-Mustafa]

For one, www.michaels.com is largely Spring-based.

That's a cool one. Thanks.

[Sebastian Nykopp]

Originally posted by Lasse Koskela:
I know of a handful of commercial websites here in Finland that have been implemented using Spring but I'm not allowed to disclose them. Pretty much all I can say is that Accenture is using Spring Framework in some of its projects in Finland and that a small IT shop named Reaktor Innovations is rumoured to do practically all their projects with Spring, for example. Obviously this is just a small fraction of what people are doing with Spring.

We do indeed use Spring Framework quite extensively at Reaktor Innovations, and have done so since the middle of 2003. It is currently part of all our internal projects, and we have introduced it in some form to virtually all our clients.

Typically we use key features such as IoC, declarative transactions, and Hibernate integration. We have also been pleased with our experience of the Acegi Security System, and adding new aspects using Spring AOP. We have not used the MVC features very much. Given the choice, we tend to favor Tapestry.

As a major upside, Spring enables us to use Test-Driven Development in an almost ubiquitous manner. Essentially all developed code is test-driven.

We have also been thinking about possible improvements. Setter-based injection, driven by a centralized application context, can sometimes break encapsulation and potentially lead to inconsistent states for context-managed beans. To some degree this could be improved by allowing annotation-based injection (especially using the native annotations of Java 5, instead of the current commons-attributes-based implementation).

We might, for example. want to do something like this in a service bean:

/**
 * @Inject(required=true)
 */
private SomeDao someDao;
 
public void setSomeDao(SomeDao dao){ };

instead of specifying all Dao wiring in the application context.

Sebastian Nykopp
Chief Architect
Reaktor Innovations

PS. Lasse, we currently employ 37 senior level software designers, so we are small but we don't really consider ourselves an "IT shop"