Keith Donald

Presentations

Developing Rich Web Applications with Spring

Spring offers several interesting modules for building and running rich web applications: Spring MVC, Spring Web Flow, Spring JavaScript, and Spring Faces. This session will provide an overview of these modules and show how they relate to one another. Attendees will see how Spring simplifies the development and deployment of rich web applications on containers like Tomcat, as well as on Spring's new application server. Attendees will also gain insight into the Spring 3.0 roadmap, including exciting new REST, JSON, and Flex support. Spring Web MVC is a popular web framework, and the foundational platform for powering Spring-based web applications. Version 2.5 introduces major new features that simplify the core MVC programming model, including support for annotated @Controllers and convention-over-configuration. This session shows how to apply these new features to gain development productivity and implementation consistency.

Building on the Spring MVC platform are a number of interesting modules. Spring Web Flow 2 adds significant power for implementing flows within a Spring MVC-based app. Spring Faces, a new module, provides support for JavaServerFaces in a familiar Spring MVC environment. And last but not last least, Spring Javascript, a new module, integrates leading UI toolkits such as Dojo into a Spring MVC environment for applying progressive enhancement techniques with Ajax. This session provides an update on these technologies, shows how to put these technologies into practice, and addresses what's coming in Spring Web 3.0. It is an overview session and sets the foundation for the rich web track at SpringOne 2008.

Working with Spring Web Flow 2

Web Flow is a Spring Web MVC extension that allows you to define Controllers using a higher-order domain-specific-language. This language is designed to model user interactions that require several requests into the server to complete, or may be invoked from different contexts. This session dives deep into the features of the Web Flow 2 definition language, and illustrates how to use it to create sophisticated controller modules. In this session you will learn:
- How to implement reusable controller modules as self-contained bundles that can be refreshed without container restart
- How to solve the back button problem and duplicate submit problem
- How to handle Ajax events and render partial responses
- How to simply data access concerns and prevent lazy loading exceptions by using flow-managed persistence
- How to secure flows, including their startup
- How to test your controller logic
- General best-practices for designing and implementing flows
- Techniques for achieving flow reuse, including use of flow definition inheritance
- Guidelines for deploying flows alongside Spring Web MVC multi-action @Controllers
- How to implement common user interaction patterns such as master detail, wizard, and tabbed UI.

Hands-on Workshop: Developing Rich Web Applications with Spring

In this session, attendees will interact with the speaker to create a web application powered by Spring MVC 3.0. Bring your laptop to this session to get hands on experience with Spring. Hands on workshop.