Starting a project with Spring 3

Question

At work we have a (large... 1-2 years of development ahead with a dozen of people in the team) project that will soon start and the "higher ups" are considering Spring 3 as the web framework (marketing hot air... whatever).

This is not a trivial web application and we don't have experience with Spring 3 (although we have some experience with Spring 2 already... but we're by no means experts). We are supposed to learn Spring 3 and start coding.

But there is this feeling I have that we'll have a hard time.

Spring 3 GA is around for an year or so and books seem not to have yet catched up. There is Pro Spring 3 and the third edition of Spring in action that I found so far covering Spring 3. The online tutorials are not very complex, and it seems the reference is all we've got as a solid foundation (which is a terse document).

As I said, I have a bad feeling. Don't get me wrong I don't mind learning Spring 3 (easy or hard going) but I'm not sure about the "safety of the project" (large project, small time frame... smell of death march) if we go with Spring 3.

I'm making an appeal to your experience. Have you created large projects with Spring 3? What issues did you encounter?

Answer 1

Spring 3 is not million light years away from Spring 2 / 2.5. If you have quite some experience with spring and spring MVC, then go for it.

But bear in mind that spring MVC is not the best web framework out there. It just takes the same old concepts a bit further ahead.

If you want something that was done with the idea of websites in mind, try Scala Lift, JRuby + Rails or PlayFramework. I'm not saying that you should code everything in scala or Ruby, but check if those frameworks give you an edge on the web part, and use any Java technology (such as spring IOC) to build your logic.

Also, if the Architects of that application want security over potential fast delivery, Spring 3 is a good choice.

One of the downsides of SpringMVC (used with JSP or JSTL) is that is not really component based framework, so it's not ideal for complex, rich clients.

As a side note, I'm using spring 3 + MVC on a small web site with quite a lot of backend processing and I'm very happy with it.