Spring Webflow

I have been using it for maybe two months and probably can say a little about it now. It is not our first choice. That would be GWT. We started NEMA mostly with the traditional Spring MVC. Amit, the leading programmer in NEMA, familiar with it, although he leaved the binding/command part out of the picture. So we used it kind of strictly of MVC model. I did not use spring mvc before, but I used Struts 1 and Spring in last project and the concepts of MVC and Inverse of Control (IoC) is not unfamiliar. I mostly do the patching work for Amit, adding a new controller, modify the existing one, etc.

Later, we need a more wizard like function, and Amit envision a site with more Ajax-like functions, such as status bar, ... So he asked me to look into GWT. But I am not familiar with it and things get bogged down as I learned it. Mostly, I felt a bit uncomfortable with GWT because it lacks the mature frame work like Spring MVC, everything backs to JSP/servlet stage. Also, it depends on CSS heavily and none of us are comfortable with it. But if it is now, I might stick longer and be more patient with it and maybe we should use it. Anyway, we cut it loose and here comes Spring Webflow.

The other senior programmer, Andrew used webflow before and he likes it. So we adopted it for its natural fit for wizard function. And in some sense, we just want to try a new tool. The webflow journey started.

It is fun experience with it. A little rough at the beginning, the first few weeks I always feel close, but something keeps popping up. Amit was kind of pissed off by my promising and not delivering. But finally, we delivered. And now it works fairly well.

A few things that I would like to say about spring webflow:

• It can use the POJO as actions, which makes me feel better and excellent for testing. Webflow provides quite some convenience to facilitate this. I rely heavily on POJO and shift quite some logic into the webflow definition. This makes the definition a bit clumsy, but it is probably a good price to pay.
  
• The history function does not work from suflow. See my post in their forum. Spring forum is kind of frustrating. No reply, even no view.
  
• Some small things that are not well-documented. Amit upgraded it to 2.1.0Milestone and does not tell me. It switched to Spring EL where it uses #() instead of $(). I dig around quite a while to figure it out.
  

It also comes a Spring JS by default bundled with Dojo, which is part of the reason I started Dojo. I am going to look into it.