itsalleasy

I just read the sample chapter for Raible’s Spring Live book on SourceBeat. It was decent. Here are my thoughts.
Liked:

• The example he is working through is done Tests-first (TDD).
• The explaination/example of using the tomcat targets in ant was good…I’d never done that before (though I knew it was out there) so it was good to see them in action.
• The example of MockStrutsTestCase…I definitely need to try this out (actually Matt asked me at one point if the AutowiringStrutsRequestProcessor would work with it…need to look closer).

Didn’t Like:

• Doesn’t use the spring base test cases to autowire the actions…but I can understand the need for simplicity in this chapter.
• Has comments telling the user to “Organize Imports” I would expect the source example to be complete and then include a hint to do an organize imports.
• His business delegate is “Web Friendly”…basically it takes Strings and converts where it shouldn’t. Not major…just don’t like the feel of it.
• I think he should have split the adding transactions via Spring AOP stuff to a different section. Seems like too much is being crammed into one section.
• Made his form request scope…then explaination of it was confusing.
• Step 8 on page 45 says you need to also list the applicationContext.xml…I don’t think this is true (I’ll have to check) I think the web app context is automatically set as the parent context.
• It was a bit long for a “quick start” tutorial.

All-in-all, it was a good read. I’d like to read the rest, but not sure about 30 a year…

UPDATE: Just read through the ref-guide and found that the reason for specifying the appcontext in the plugin is to get around a problem with MockStrutsTestCase…namely, that it will not load the listeners (and hence the parent spring context). I guess this won’t cause problems when running this way from an actual container? Will there be 2 instances of all the beans in applicationContext.xml at 2 different levels in the context tree?