Raible Designs

AppFuse vs. Spring

I received an interesting e-mail this morning. The writer said his team is comparing AppFuse and Spring in terms of kick starting a project. This struck me as odd, especially since these two applications are quite different. Here's my response:

I think AppFuse and Spring are two completely different animals. IMO, Spring is excellent for wiring components together (i.e. Interfaces and Implementations) as well as simplifying J2EE's APIs. Of course, it has its own web framework too, but it also integrates nicely with Struts, WebWork and Tapestry. AppFuse is designed to be an application that helps you get *up and running* with your J2EE web application in the minimal amount of time. Its power is in the directory structure, Ant integration (build.xml) and testability. Also, XDoclet is heavily leveraged for code generation and maximizing developer's productivity. In essence, it's really just a packaging of other open source projects, including: Ant, XDoclet, Hibernate, JUnit, Cactus, StrutsTestCase, Canoo's WebTest, Struts Menu, Display Tag Library, JSTL and Struts (including Validator and Tiles). But rather than just packaging these together, it's also got Security and User Management built-in and contains tutorials on how to develop and test the different layers.

Here are some links on integrating Spring with other Java-based web frameworks:

Struts: http://struts.sourceforge.net/struts-spring/
WebWork: http://wiki.opensymphony.com/space/Spring+Framework+Integration
Tapestry: http://www.springframework.org/docs/integration/tapestry.html

And here are a couple of good simple descriptions of Spring:

http://test.javaranch.com/wiki/view?SpringFramework
http://barracudamvc.org/lists/archives/barracuda/2003-December/007156.html

I do plan on integrating Spring into AppFuse in the next release - so it might be awhile until I release 1.4. I basically plan on using it to wire my Managers together, as well as my DAOs. Currently, I don't think I'll use its web framework, but who knows. In the latter half of this year, I hope to add support for WebWork and Tapestry as web frameworks.