The Spring MVC Basic and Ajax Application
Besides the spring-mvc-showcase project, Spring provides two other projects to demonstrate the various
usage scenarios of Spring MVC 3. The project mvc-basic (under the folder mvc-basic) is a very simple
Spring MVC project with a single controller. The mvc-ajax project (under the folder mvc-ajax)
demonstrates how to use Spring MVC to build web applications with Ajax support. The server side was
built using Spring MVC, and using its build-in RESTful-WS support, requests were mapped and data was
returned in JSON format. On the client side, jQuery, a popular JavaScript library with Ajax support, was
used to interact with Spring MVC to provide a rich user experience.
The Spring Petcare Application
The petcare sample (under the folder petcare) is another interesting project. It is a full-blown web
application that showcase a lot of different features of the Spring Framework and other Spring projects.
On the web side, it uses Spring MVC with Spring Security for securing those protected resources. For
views, it integrates with Tiles for templating support. Mailing support can also be found here.
Another interesting feature is the integration with the Spring Integration project in broadcasting
application messages. Another Spring project, Spring Roo, was used to generate the JavaBeans base on
the backend database schema.
Protecting web application resources using Spring Security will be covered in Chapter 17, while a
high-level overview on using Spring Framework with other Spring projects, including Spring Integration
and Spring Roo, will be covered in Chapter 20.
Spring Webflow Sample Applications
Several sample projects showcase the features of Spring and Spring Webflow. The travel application
(under the folder travel) is a reference for Spring Framework 3 with Spring Webflow 2.1.
Spring Webflow integrates with many view technologies; one of them is Java Server Faces (JSF).
Spring Faces is a module in Spring Webflow that provides tight integration with JSF. There are two
sample applications to demonstrate this feature. The webflow-primefaces-showcase sample (under the
folder webflow-primefaces-showcase) shows the integration with Primefaces, while the webflow-
richfaces-showcase sample (under the folder webflow-richfaces-showcase) shows the integration with
JBoss Richfaces. Both Primefaces and JBoss Richfaces are popular JSF libraries, and their latest versions
comply with JSF 2.0 standards.
Web application development using Spring Webflow, with Primefaces as an example, will be
covered in Chapter 18.
Spring Documentation
One of the aspects of Spring that makes it such a useful framework for real developers who are building
real applications is its wealth of well-written, accurate documentation. In every release, the Spring
Framework's documentation team works hard to ensure that all the documentation is finished and
polished by the development team. This means that every feature of Spring is not only fully
documented in the JavaDoc but is also covered in the Spring reference manual included in every
distribution. If you haven't yet familiarized yourself with the Spring JavaDoc and the reference manual,
do so now. This topic does not aim to be a replacement for either of these resources; rather, it aims to
be a complementary reference, demonstrating how to build a Spring-based application from the
ground up.
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