Frameworks in java

Frameworks in Java:
Hibernate,
Apache Struts2,
Spring.
Darshan Patel
1

Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Professor Sunil Joshi for being my dissertation tutor and
examiner. Their patient, responsible attitude and meaningful advice help me steer
clear of various serious mistakes and direct successfully my dissertation to the final
destination.
Darshan Patel
2

• Java web framework has been widely used in industry Java web applications in the last few
years, its outstanding MVC design concept and supported web features provide great
benefits of standardizing application structure and reducing development time and effort.
• However, after years of evolution, numerous Java web frameworks have been invented
with different focuses, it becomes increasingly difficult for developers to select a suitable
framework for their web applications.
• In this dissertation, I conduct a general comparison of three popular Java web
frameworks: Hibernate, Struts and Spring and I try to help web developers or technique
managers gain a deep insight of these frameworks through the comparison and therefore
be able to choose the right framework for their web applications.
3

Introduction
• With the increasing need for the maintainability and extensibility of web
applications, it is very important to select a robust, efficient and suitable
framework to standardize and bring structure to web application development.
Among numerous technologies now existing, many web developers show great
preference for the Java web frameworks because of the outstanding design
concepts and the popularity of Java programming language. Java web framework is
a platform based on Model-View-Control (MVC) design pattern which dictates
structure and separates web application into different components to help
safeguard it from a potential mess of tangled code. Currently as almost every Java
web application adopts Java web frameworks as the implementation of the web
presentation tier, the Java web framework has already became an indispensable
part of the Java web development.
4

• In the early days of building Java web applications, developers often used JSP scriptlets and
printed out content they wanted to display directly within their scriptlets—the same place
where critical business logic was located. Although to some degree this could greatly reduce
the time spending and increase the efficiency of development, it soon becomes clear that this
technique too tightly coupled the core business code with the presentation, which greatly
limits the readability, maintainability and extensibility of a web application. As the elicitation
of the concept: “Web MVC”, it is now possible to divide web applications easily into “Model-
View-Controller" three tier structure with each tier capable of being developed and tested
independently without affecting each other. Although extra integration work for the different
tiers is needed, the benefit we could procure from the separation is incontestable. The first
mature Java Web MVC implementation is the “JSP Model 2” structure defined by Sun
Microsystem, which has been proved as the foundation of building Java web applications .
5

• The success of the Web MVC has triggered a proliferation of the Java web
presentation frameworks. During the last few years, there are a glut of Java web
frameworks invented, each of which has its special design concept, advantage and
disadvantage, it has thus becomes increasingly difficult for Java web developers to
choose the right framework to use. Moreover, because of the complexity and
distinctness of design concepts between different frameworks, it often takes months
for developers to learn a new framework. Considering the time and effort needed to
spend for choosing and learning java web frameworks, the term “framework” has
6

• actually turned into a “burden” for project teams. To solve this problem, a few researches
related to this field have been preformed such as “Architectural models of J2EE Web tier
frameworks” *Timo Westkämper, 2004+ and “Art of Java Web development” *Neal
ford, 2003]. However, the purpose of these researches is to help readers to understand java
web presentation tier development, and although they listed and introduced several popular
java web frameworks, not enough feature comparison of web frameworks is provided. In
addition, Java open source expert Matt Raible has given several conference presentations for
comparing java web frameworks, for instance, “Java web framework sweet sport” *Matt
Raible,2006+ and “Comparing Java web frameworks” *Matt Raible,2007], although in these
presentations pros and cons of different framework features have been pointed
out, measurements were restricted to concept discussion, there were no detailed examples
and practical issues presented, Indeed developers with little experience of a specific
framework can barely comprehend the points referring to that framework.
7

• The goal of this dissertation is to help web developers or technique managers gain deep
insight of these frameworks through a comparison and therefore are able to choose the
right framework for their web application. This work investigates three popular Java web
frameworks: Hibernate, Struts and Spring. After the introduction chapter, the background
technology information is presented in chapter two which includes a basic introduction of
technologies used in Java web, MVC design pattern information and the concept of Java
web frameworks. After second chapter the description of the frameworks will be started
which will cover Hibernate, Struts and Spring. The last chapter includes a general
conclusion for this dissertation and some future work.
8

Technology used in Java web
• The core technology used in the Java web is JSP and Servlet. However, in order to
build an integrated Java web application, the technologies listed below are also
needed:
• Java Bean components
• EJB components
• JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) and Expression Language
• XML language
9

Java Servlet technology
• Servlet is designed as a general extensible framework and provides a Java class-
based mechanism for handling the web request-response mode.
• When a web client try to visit a Servlet, the Servlet container will first create a
“ServletRequest” and “ServletResponse” instance for the clients, then it
encapsulates the request information and passes both of the instances to the
appointed Servlet. After the execution of the Servlet, the response result will be
written into the “ServletResponse” instance and return back to the clients via the
Servlet container. The whole process is illustrated in figure 2.2:
11

JavaServer Page
• JavaServer Page (JSP) offers a simplified, fast way to create dynamic web
content, it was developed in 1999 by Sun Microsystem, Inc and introduced
to overcome the problems raised by using the pure Servlet for web
applications, such as tedious web content generation and the difficulty of
maintenance.The nature of the JSP is actually a Servlet, the Servlet
container will use an internal “JSP Engine” to compile the JSP pages and
save them into RAM memory as a Servlet class if the compilation is
successful. However, in contrast to the pure Java code Servlet, the JSP
adopt a more flexible mechanism –combination of static HTML page, Java
scriptlets, JSTL and its Expression Language– to generate the dynamical
content for the web clients which is much more efficient and convenient
than directly editing the Servlet java source code. Another difference
between Servlet and JSP is that the JSP-Servlet would not be compiled and
generated until the first call from the web clients, and if the original JSP
page was modified, the container would automatically detect and
recompile it without restarting the web application.
12

JavaBean component
• JavaBean is a Java class which conforms to the special standard based on Sun’s
JavaBean specification , it provides a series of private properties and defines public
accessing method for each of these properties.
• In JSP page, there are some special tags used to define and visit JavaBean
• <jsp:useBean id=”YourID” scope=”request/session/application” class=”
CounterBean”>
• <jsp:setProperty name=”YourID” property=” count” value=”0”>
• <jsp:getProperty name=”YourID” property =”count”>
• Originally JavaBean was designed as a reusable software component that can be
manipulated visually in a builder tool to make the GUI application more efficient,
13

• When JSP and JavaBean come into play
together, the JSP page focuses on the
dynamical generation of web content, it
supplies web templates for the application
data to fit in, whereas JavaBean components
offer business logic and data to the web page.
14

Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB)
• the Enterprise JavaBeans technology is quite a bit more complex than the
"Standard Edition" JavaBeans technology. According to J2EE specification defined
by Sun, the EJB components are distributed and must be contained in the EJB
containers which could be supplied by the third-part producers and offer the
service of security, resource sharing, continuing operations, parallel processing and
transaction integration to EJB.
• Same as JavaBeans, EJB supplies the business service for the web application, it
does not concern with the user view or anything related to the presentation tier.
15

JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library
• JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) is the technology introduced to overcome
the serious shortcoming of JSP: mixing presentation and business logic and difficult to
understand and maintain. It supports for common, structural tasks such as iteration and
conditionals, tags for manipulating XML documents, internationalization tags, and SQL
tags.
• Following are two examples of JSP page showing the request variable “username” value
with JSP scriptlets and with JSTL and Expression language technology:
• (1) With JSP Scriptlet:
• <%String username = request.gerParameter(“username”);
• Out.println(username);%>
• (2) With JSTL and its Expression language
• <c:out value='${param.username}'/>
16

XML language
• The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a general-purpose markup language. It is
classified as an extensible language because it allows its users to define their own
tags. XML language primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of structured data
across different information systems, particularly via the Internet.
• XML files often behave as the configuration files of the software, in the context of
Java web application, the “web.xml” file is the one which define the configurations
for Java Servlet, Tag library, security, resource reference and some other
initialization configuration.
• The biggest advantage we could receive from the XML configuration file is that we
have no need to modify and recompile the source code once we change the low
level configurations, we just need to edit the configuration variable in the XML file
and restarting the web application.
17

• The following example consists of four XML
sentences which represents the
communication information.
• <friend>
• <name> abc</name>
• <phone> 9925546899</phone>
• <address>def</address>
• </friend>
18

Introduction to MVC
• The Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern was
originally brought forward by Trygve Reenskaug and applied
in the SmallTalk-80 environment for the first time, the
purpose of it is to implement a dynamic software design
which simplifies the maintenance and extension of the
software application. MVC seeks to break an application
into different parts and define the interactions between
these components, thereby limiting the coupling between
them and allowing for each one to focus on its
responsibilities without worrying about the others. MVC
consists of three categories of the components:
Model, View and Controller. This means that it separates
the input, processing, and output for the applications and
constructs them into a Model-View-Controller three tier
structure.
19

Traditional MVC has become
outdated
• Although the original MVC pattern worked well for
desktop GUI applications, it failed to map directly to
the World Wide Web. In the traditional MVC, after the
“View” component interacting with the user, typically a
button submitting from users, the “Controller”
component receives the view-changing events and
modified the relative data in the “Model”
component, then the “View” component acquires the
model-change event from the “Model” and refresh
itself to show the updated data to users. However, this
process is broken when applying to a web application
because of different hardware and software structure
between a desktop application and a web application.
20

Web version MVC: Front Controller
Pattern
• the front controller pattern utilizes a core controller, commonly
implemented as a Servlet, as the initial point of contact for handling
a URL request. This core controller provides a centralized entry
point that addresses common services such as security
services, delegating business processing, exception strategy and
configuration initialization so that the web application could have a
centralized, unitive control without resulting in duplicated code.
• In the traditional MVC, the view management and navigation is
integrated into the “Controller” component, there is no obvious
partition between the view management and other functions. In
the context of web MVC, the Front Controller Pattern brings
forward the “dispatcher” concept and abstracts them out of the
traditional “Controller”. A dispatcher is mainly responsible for view
management and navigation, managing the choice of the next view
to present to the user,
22

• Figure 2.4 shows the sequence diagram representing the Front Controller Pattern. When
the “Controller” receives UI events such as users’ submit, it will transfer the control right to
the “Dispatcher” and “Helper” components, the “Dispatcher” chooses and sends the
appropriate view page as a response to the clients according to the result code returned by
the “Helper” class. From the figure we could see that the “Controller”, “Dispatcher” and
“Helper” together act as the “Controller” role in MVC pattern, and “View”, normally a web
page, act as “view” role in MVC pattern.
24

Introduction to frameworks
• A framework dictates the overall architecture
of the application and predefines features in
the form of reusable classes, utility
classes, and base classes for developers to
extend and utilize.
25

They are the enhancement of JSP and
Servlet API
• As people build more and more Java web application, it becomes increasingly clear
that although the JSP and Servlet API are extremely useful, they can not deal with
the common tasks without the tedious code, the natural of Servlet API is stateless
and operation-centric, it just covers the basic infrastructure necessary for building
web applications and offers low level abstraction for the developers, developers
always need extra effort to deal with problems such as type conversion, exception
handling, internationalization and so on, these problems are where the java web
framework set foot in.
26

JSP Model 2
• JSP Model 2 is the first successful Java MVC structure which combines the different
Java web technologies together. It makes use of JavaBeans to represent the
“Model” and utilizes JavaServer Pages (JSP) and Servlet technique to act as “View”
and “Controller” role of MVC.
27

• The Java Servlet controller in “JSP Model 2” takes charge of handling the requests of
clients, creating and managing the JavaBean instances and manipulating and redirecting
the suitable view pages for the web clients. The view tier, normally implemented as JSP
pages (or other template languages), processes no business logic, it only searches the
JavaBean instance created by Servlet and put the dynamic contents into the static view
templates. This breakthrough design method clearly defines the circumscription between
the presentation tier and business domain model and nails down the work division for the
web page designers and application programmers, as a result the more complexity the
web application has the more benefit it could obtain from the JSP Model 2 structure.
• Most of Java web frameworks (including the three chosen framework in this dissertation)
are built on the basis of the JSP Model 2.
29

Hibernate
Overview
• Hibernate is the ORM tool given to transfer the data between a java (object)
application and a database (Relational) in the form of the objects. Hibernate is the
open source light weight tool given by Gavin King.
• Hibernate is a non-invasive framework, means it wont forces the programmers to
extend/implement any class/interface, and in hibernate we have all POJO classes
so its light weight.
• Hibernate can run with in or with out server, i mean it will suitable for all types of
java applications (stand alone or desktop or any servlets)
• Hibernate is purely for persistence (to store/retrieve data from Database).
30

Draw Backs of JDBC:
• In JDBC, if we open a database connection we need to write in try, and if any
exceptions occurred catch block will takers about it, and finally used to close the
connections.
• Here as a programmer we must close the connection, or we may get a chance to
get our of connections message…!
• Actually if we didn‘t close the connection in the finally block, then jdbc doesn‘t
responsible to close that connection.
• In JDBC we need to write Sql commands in various places, after the program has
created if the table structure is modified then the JDBC program doesn‘t
work, again we need to modify and compile and re-deploy required, which is
tedious.
• JDBC used to generate database related error codes if an exception will occurs, but
java programmers are unknown about this error codes.
• In the Enterprise applications, the data flow with in an application from class to
class will be in the form of objects, but while storing data finally in a database
using JDBC then that object will be converted into text. Because JDBC doesn‘t
transfer objects directly.
32

Advantages of hibernates:• Hibernate supports Inheritance, Associations, Collections
• In hibernate if we save the derived class object, then its base class object will also be stored into the
database, it means hibernate supporting inheritance
• Hibernate supports relationships like One-To-Many,One-To-One, Many-To-Many-to-Many, Many-To-One
• This will also supports collections like List,Set,Map (Only new collections)
• In jdbc all exceptions are checked exceptions, so we must write code in try, catch and throws, but in
hibernate we only have Un-checked exceptions, so no need to write try, catch, or no need to write
throws. Actually in hibernate we have the translator which converts checked to Un-checked
• Hibernate has capability to generate primary keys automatically while we are storing the records into
database
• Hibernate has its own query language, i.e hibernate query language which is database independent
• So if we change the database, then also our application will works as HQL is database independent
• HQL contains database independent commands
• While we are inserting any record, if we don’t have any particular table in the database, JDBC will rises
an error like “View not exist”, and throws exception, but in case of hibernate, if it not found any table in
the database this will create the table for us
• Hibernate supports caching mechanism by this, the number of round trips between an application and
the database will be reduced, by using this caching technique an application performance will be
increased automatically.
• Hibernate supports annotations, apart from XML
• Hibernate provided Dialect classes, so we no need to write sql queries in hibernate, instead we use the
methods provided by that API.
34

Disadvantages of hibernates:
• Its saying hibernate is little slower than pure
JDBC, actually the reason being hibernate
used to generate many SQL statements in run
time, but i guess this is not the disadvantage
• But there is one major disadvantage, which
was boilerplate code issue, actually we need
to write same code in several files in the same
application, but spring eliminated this
35

Apache Struts 2
Overview
• Apache Struts 2 is an elegant, extensible framework for creating
enterprise-ready Java web applications.
• The framework is designed to streamline the full development
cycle, from building, to deploying, to maintaining applications over
time. Apache Struts 2 was originally known as WebWork 2.
• Struts2 is popular and mature web application framework based on
the MVC design pattern. Struts2 is not just the next version of
Struts 1, but it is a complete rewrite of the Struts architecture.
• The WebWork framework started off with Struts framework as the
basis and its goal was to offer an enhanced and improved
framework built on Struts to make web development easier for the
developers.
• After some time, the Webwork framework and the Struts
community joined hands to create the famous Struts2 framework.
37

Architecture
• From a high level, Struts2 is a pull-MVC (or MVC2) framework. The Model-View-
Controller pattern in Struts2 is realized with following five core components:
• Actions
• Interceptors
• Value Stack / OGNL
• Results / Result types
• View technologies
• Struts 2 is slightly different from a traditional MVC framework in that the action
takes the role of the model rather than the controller, although there is some
overlap.
38

• The above diagram depicts the Model, View and Controller to the Struts2 high level
architecture. The controller is implemented with a Struts2 dispatch servlet filter as well
as interceptors, the model is implemented with actions, and the view as a combination
of result types and results. The value stack and OGNL provide common thread, linking
and enabling integration between the other components.
• Apart from the above components, there will be a lot of information that relates to
configuration. Configuration for the web application, as well as configuration for
actions, interceptors, results, etc.
• This is the architectural overview of the Struts 2 MVC pattern.
40

Request life cycle:
• Based on the above digram, one can explain the user's request life
cycle in Struts 2 as follows:
1. User sends a request to the server for requesting for some
resource (i.e pages).
2. The FilterDispatcher looks at the request and then determines the
appropriate Action.
3. Configured interceptors functionalities applies such as
validation, file upload etc.
4. Selected action is executed to perform the requested operation.
5. Again, configured interceptors are applied to do any post-
processing if required.
6. Finally the result is prepared by the view and returns the result to
the user.
41

Struts 2 framework features(Advantages):
• POJO forms and POJO actions - Struts2 has done away with the Action Forms that
were an integral part of the Struts framework. With Struts2, you can use any POJO to
receive the form input. Similarly, you can now see any POJO as an Action class.
• Tag support - Struts2 has improved the form tags and the new tags allow the
developers to write less code.
• AJAX support - Struts2 has recognised the take over by Web2.0 technologies, and has
integrated AJAX support into the product by creating AJAX tags, that function very
similar to the standard Struts2 tags.
• Easy Integration - Integration with other frameworks like Spring, Tiles and SiteMesh is
now easier with a variety of integration available with Struts2.
• Template Support - Support for generating views using templates.
• Plugin Support - The core Struts2 behaviour can be enhanced and augmented by the
use of plugins. A number of plugins are available for Struts2.
• Profiling - Struts2 offers integrated profiling to debug and profile the application. In
addition to this, Struts also offers integrated debugging with the help of built in
debugging tools.
• Easy to modify tags - Tag markups in Struts2 can be tweaked using Freemarker
templates. This does not require JSP or java knowledge. Basic HTML, XML and CSS
knowledge is enough to modify the tags.
• Promote less configuration - Struts2 promotes less configuration with the help of
using default values for various settings. You don't have to configure something unless
it deviates from the default settings set by Struts2.
• View Technologies: - Struts2 has a great support for multiple view options
(JSP, Freemarker, Velocity and XSLT)
42

Struts 2 disadvantages:
• Bigger learning curve - To use MVC with Struts, you
have to be comfortable with the standard JSP, Servlet
APIs and a large & elaborate framework.
• Poor documentation - Compared to the standard
servlet and JSP APIs, Struts has fewer online
resources, and many first-time users find the online
Apache documentation confusing and poorly
organized.
• Less transparent - With Struts applications, there is a
lot more going on behind the scenes than with normal
Java-based Web applications which makes it difficult to
understand the framework.
43

Spring
OVERVIEW
• Spring framework is an open source Java platform that provides
comprehensive infrastructure support for developing robust Java
applications very easily and very rapidly.
• Spring framework was initially written by Rod Johnson and was first
released under the Apache 2.0 license in June 2003.
• Spring is the most popular application development framework for
enterprise Java. Millions of developers around the world use Spring
Framework to create high performing, easily testable, reusable code.
• Spring is lightweight when it comes to size and transparency. The basic
version of spring framework is around 2MB.
• The core features of the Spring Framework can be used in developing any
Java application, but there are extensions for building web applications on
top of the Java EE platform. Spring framework targets to make J2EE
development easier to use and promote good programming practice by
enabling a POJO-based programming model.
44

Architecture
• Spring could potentially be a one-stop shop for all
your enterprise applications, however, Spring is
modular, allowing you to pick and choose which
modules are applicable to you, without having to
bring in the rest. Following section gives detail
about all the modules available in Spring
Framework.
• The Spring Framework provides about 20
modules which can be used based on an
application requirement.
45

Core Container:
The Core Container consists of the Core, Beans, Context, and Expression Language
modules whose detail is as follows:
• The Core module provides the fundamental parts of the framework, including the IoC
and Dependency Injection features.
• The Bean module provides BeanFactory which is a sophisticated implementation of the
factory pattern.
• The Context module builds on the solid base provided by the Core and Beans modules
and it is a medium to access any objects defined and configured. The
ApplicationContext interface is the focal point of the Context module.
• The Expression Language module provides a powerful expression language for
querying and manipulating an object graph at runtime.
Data Access/Integration:
• The Data Access/Integration layer consists of the JDBC, ORM, OXM, JMS and
Transaction modules whose detail is as follows:
• The JDBC module provides a JDBC-abstraction layer that removes the need to do
tedious JDBC related coding.
• The ORM module provides integration layers for popular object-relational mapping
APIs, including JPA, JDO, Hibernate, and iBatis.
• The OXM module provides an abstraction layer that supports Object/XML mapping
implementations for JAXB, Castor, XMLBeans, JiBX and XStream.
• The Java Messaging Service JMS module contains features for producing and
consuming messages.
• The Transaction module supports programmatic and declarative transaction
management for classes that implement special interfaces and for all your POJOs.
47

Web:
The Web layer consists of the Web, Web-Servlet, Web-Struts, and Web-Portlet
modules whose detail is as follows:
• The Web module provides basic web-oriented integration features such as
multipart file-upload functionality and the initialization of the IoC container
using servlet listeners and a web-oriented application context.
• The Web-Servlet module contains Spring's model-view-controller (MVC)
implementation for web applications.
• The Web-Struts module contains the support classes for integrating a classic
Struts web tier within a Spring application.
• The Web-Portlet module provides the MVC implementation to be used in a
portlet environment and mirrors the functionality of Web-Servlet module.
Miscellaneous:
There are few other important modules like
AOP, Aspects, Instrumentation, Web and Test modules whose detail is as
follows:
• The AOP module provides aspect-oriented programming implementation
allowing you to define method-interceptors and pointcuts to cleanly
decouple code that implements functionality that should be separated.
• The Aspects module provides integration with AspectJ which is again a
powerful and mature aspect oriented programming (AOP) framework.
• The Instrumentation module provides class instrumentation support and
class loader implementations to be used in certain application servers.
• The Test module supports the testing of Spring components with JUnit or
TestNG frameworks.
48

Advantages of Spring Framework:
• Spring enables developers to develop enterprise-class applications using POJOs. The
benefit of using only POJOs is that you do not need an EJB container product such as
an application server but you have the option of using only a robust servlet container
such as Tomcat or some commercial product.
• Spring is organized in a modular fashion. Even though the number of packages and
classes are substantial, you have to worry only about ones you need and ignore the
rest.
• Spring does not reinvent the wheel instead, it truly makes use of some of the existing
technologies like several ORM frameworks, logging frameworks, JEE, Quartz and JDK
timers, other view technologies.
• Testing an application written with Spring is simple because environment-dependent
code is moved into this framework. Furthermore, by using JavaBean-style POJOs, it
becomes easier to use dependency injection for injecting test data.
• Spring's web framework is a well-designed web MVC framework, which provides a
great alternative to web frameworks such as Struts or other over engineered or less
popular web frameworks.
• Spring provides a convenient API to translate technology-specific exceptions (thrown
by JDBC, Hibernate, or JDO, for example) into consistent, unchecked exceptions.
• Lightweight IoC containers tend to be lightweight, especially when compared to EJB
containers, for example. This is beneficial for developing and deploying applications
on computers with limited memory and CPU resources.
• Spring provides a consistent transaction management interface that can scale down
to a local transaction (using a single database, for example) and scale up to global
transactions (using JTA, for example). 49

Dependency Injection (DI):
• The technology that Spring is most identified with is the Dependency Injection (DI)
flavor of Inversion of Control. The Inversion of Control (IoC) is a general concept,
and it can be expressed in many different ways and Dependency Injection is
merely one concrete example of Inversion of Control.
• When writing a complex Java application, application classes should be as
independent as possible of other Java classes to increase the possibility to reuse
these classes and to test them independently of other classes while doing unit
testing. Dependency Injection helps in gluing these classes together and same
time keeping them independent.
• What is dependency injection exactly? Let's look at these two words separately.
Here the dependency part translates into an association between two classes. For
example, class A is dependent on class B. Now, let's look at the second part,
injection. All this means is that class B will get injected into class A by the IoC.
• Dependency injection can happen in the way of passing parameters to the
constructor or by post-construction using setter methods. Dependency Injection is
the heart of Spring Framework.
50

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP):
• One of the key components of Spring is the Aspect oriented
programming (AOP) framework. The functions that span multiple
points of an application are called cross-cutting concerns and these
cross-cutting concerns are conceptually separate from the
application's business logic. There are various common good
examples of aspects including logging, declarative
transactions, security, and caching etc.
• The key unit of modularity in OOP is the class, whereas in AOP the
unit of modularity is the aspect. Whereas DI helps you decouple
your application objects from each other, AOP helps you decouple
cross-cutting concerns from the objects that they affect.
• The AOP module of Spring Framework provides aspect-oriented
programming implementation allowing you to define method-
interceptors and pointcuts to cleanly decouple code that
implements functionality that should be separated.
51

Web feature Comparison(Data
Analysis)
Struts 2 over Spring
• In most of the key features compared, Spring MVC and Struts 2 are
equally good, except in the UI supports. It seems to me Spring MVC
just provides tags for basic HTML form tags while Struts/WebWork
2 provides many out-of-box JSF-styled complex and composite
tags, such as:
•
a) Struts 2 integrates with Dojo AJAX framework closely and
provides many complex UI components out-of-box, such as
datepicker, tooltips, etc.
b) Struts 2 has AJAX theme.
c) Struts 2 tags are stylesheet-driven, making it easier to develop
consistent pages.
d) Struts 2 checkboxes are stateful, and require no special handling.
The recent release of Spring 2.0 does not seem to have any work on
this area.
52

• Struts is mainly a presentation layer framework, like redirecting to a particular page
,doing client side validations etc which otherwise very tedious using jsp and servlets.
Spring is a complete J2EE framework having seven independent layers which can be
used all together or few layers integrated with some other framework. Spring
provides declarative transaction management and AOP. One layer of spring is for
presentation purpose like struts but for only presentation layer, struts is better than
spring.
• Struts has been around a long time and has been popular for years – there’s a wealth
of knowledge about it in the user community and more literature around
• If you want a bunch of taglibs that generate form fields and so forth, Struts is probably
the better choice.
• Our UI is mostly click-driven and light on data and validation. It seems to me that most
people run into difficulties with Struts when they start moving a lot of data from HTTP
into the model. We didn?t have that problem .
• Spring does not present a framework for implementing business/domain logic. It
helps you create a Controller and a View for your application, no Model though.
Spring is a fully fledged application framework, that has a large stack of sub projects.
• As for spring, if we look at its history, it started as an effort for supplying a solution for
enterprise java applications, and to replace EJBs (while it also provided integration
with EJBs for people who didn’t want to ditch that). Spring is much more than an MVC
framework. It provides dependency injection, AOP, integration with almost every
known framework, a security framework (a separate sub-project), and a lot of other
stuff. Struts 2 and hibernate integrate easily with spring.
53

Spring over Struts2
• Spring provides a very clean division between controllers, JavaBean models, and
views.
• Spring's MVC is very flexible. Unlike Struts, which forces your Action and Form objects
into concrete inheritance (thus taking away your single shot at concrete inheritance in
Java), Spring MVC is entirely based on interfaces. Furthermore, just about every part of
the Spring MVC framework is configurable via plugging in your own interface. Of
course we also provide convenience classes as an implementation option.
• Spring, like WebWork, provides interceptors as well as controllers, making it easy to
factor out behavior common to the handling of many requests.
• Spring MVC is truly view-agnostic. You don't get pushed to use JSP if you don't want to;
you can use Velocity, XLST or other view technologies. If you want to use a custom
view mechanism - for example, your own templating language - you can easily
implement the Spring View interface to integrate it.
• Spring Controllers are configured via IoC like any other objects. This makes them easy
to test, and beautifully integrated with other objects managed by Spring.
• Spring MVC web tiers are typically easier to test than Struts web tiers, due to the
avoidance of forced concrete inheritance and explicit dependence of controllers on the
dispatcher servlet.
• The web tier becomes a thin layer on top of a business object layer. This encourages
good practice. Struts and other dedicated web frameworks leave you on your own in
implementing your business objects; Spring provides an integrated framework for all
tiers of your application.
54

Future Direction
• This dissertation is limited to comparative
study of 3 most common frameworks. But java
technology contains more than 30 frameworks
which are used for different purposes in IT
industries.
• Still more comparative study is possible with
following frameworks which are also widely
used now a day.
55

Summary
• Java web framework is a set of related classes and other
supporting elements that make Java web application
development easier by supplying pre-built parts.
Frameworks become popular because they ease the
complexity and enable web developers to write at a high
level of abstraction without compromising the application
content. However, to take full advantage of frameworks`
benefit, necessary studies must be done to find out the
optimum framework applied to the application. The main
purpose of this dissertation was to help web developers or
technique managers gain deep insight of three popular Java
web framework: Hibernate, Struts2, and Spring through the
comparison conducted in this these and try to conclude the
best suited web application types of these frameworks.
57

Frameworks in java

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