Raible Designs

Upgrading AppFuse to Spring 2.5

Last night, I spent a few minutes upgrading AppFuse to Spring 2.5 RC1. According to InfoQ, Spring 2.5 is a drop-in upgrade for Spring 2.0. However, if you're using Maven, it's not quite that easy. The good news is it is easy, you just need to change your pom.xml a bit. The steps I used to upgrade AppFuse are listed below:

• Add a repository for Spring's milestone releases:

  <repository>
      <id>spring-milestone</id>
      <url>http://s3.amazonaws.com/maven.springframework.org/milestone</url>
  </repository>
  

• Change artifactId of "spring-mock" to be "spring-test".
• Change version to be 2.5-rc1.

At this point, if you're using "spring" as your artifactId (instead of the smaller fine-grained dependencies), you'll likely get the following error in a Spring MVC application:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: 
org/springframework/web/servlet/handler/AbstractUrlHandlerMapping

This happens because Spring MVC is no longer included in the uber spring.jar. You'll need to add a dependency on "spring-webmvc" to solve this problem. Unfortunately, this JAR is dependent on the fine-grained modules, so you may have to modify your pom.xml to depend on the fine-grained modules - or exclude them all from spring-webmvc.

The good news is Spring has excluded all the invalid commons-logging dependencies for you so you don't have to anymore.

After getting all the dependencies straightened out - I ran the integration tests:

org.springframework.beans.NotReadablePropertyException: Invalid property 
'fileUpload' of bean class [org.appfuse.webapp.controller.FileUpload]: Bean 
property 'fileUpload' is not readable or has an invalid getter method: Does the 
return type of the getter match the parameter type of the setter?

Looking at uploadForm.jsp, I'm guessing the problem happens because of the following code:

<spring:bind path="fileUpload.file">
<input type="file" name="file" id="file" class="file medium" value="<c:out value="${status.value}"/>"/>
</spring:bind>

Confirmed - changing the "path" attribute to "file" fixes the problem. I also found out that setting the "value" on an <input type="file"> doesn't work, so wrapping the field with <spring:bind> doesn't make a whole lot of sense anyway.

To conclude, it doesn't look like the first release candidate of Spring 2.5 is exactly a drop-in upgrade for Spring 2.0, but it's pretty darn close. I'm sure by the time it's released, it will be. I'd encourage you to try 2.5 in your Spring-dependent projects to see if you find any issues.

Update: I was successfully able to migrate AppFuse from using the uber JAR to fine-grained JARs. However, I ran into a couple issues in the process. The first is that even though I'm including spring-aop in the appfuse-service module, it's not pulled in for the web frameworks (which depend on appfuse-service). Explicitly declaring spring-aop as a dependency for the appfuse-web module fixes this. Secondly, I had to modify my Acegi Security exclusions so it wouldn't include dependencies that no longer exist in 2.5.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.acegisecurity</groupId>
    <artifactId>acegi-security-tiger</artifactId>
    <version>${acegi.version}</version>
    <exclusions>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-dao</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-jdbc</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-remoting</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-support</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
    </exclusions>
</dependency>