Introduction - spring-on-rails - Project Hosting on Google Code

Updated Sep 29, 2007 by sunnyliu2

Introduction

I have been spent most of development time on system integration and architecture design in past 15 years also. Writing a Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) is not a difficult task to me, especially with help of many excellent open source projects, such as Apache, SpringFramework, Ibatis, and Hibernate etc. However, develop a database driven JEE application could take weeks to months even with those tools I mentioned above. I had a few projects that has very tight schedule recently; and I decided to roll up my sleeve to code the applications from beginning to end, similarity of application made me to think why I can not do it like Ruby-On-Rails does?

After a week of hacking, I finally came up a prototype of WebApplicationGenerator. I decided to rename it to Spring-On-Rails because of inspiration of Ruby-On-Rails. However, Spring-On-Rails is not exact replica of Ruby-On-Rails in Java. It does use Ruby-On-Rails' bottom-up approach (database first); secondly it does not use any scripting language, it is pure JEE application.

Spring-On-Rails will generate a Spring base application and Database DDL according to entity mapping. The example of entity mapping file is shown below. It is fairly intuitive for understanding; it is used to map a Java Object to a relational database table. Entity mapping also allow you to add additional methods to PoJo, or overwrite generated getter and setter in PoJo.

Create A JEE application in five minutes

With Spring-On-Rails, you would measure project time in minutes instead of weeks or months. Spring-On-Rails will help you handles all of tedious repetitive tasks, you can focus on your core business logic and use code unit generated by Spring-On-Rails to compose a true enterprise application.

Comment by aimonister, Nov 08, 2007

I have just completed a project where I used the original version of this framework. When I read about it, I thought this was perfect, for the kind of software applications that I build. Mine are mostly web application with relatively simple CRUD activities in the mid-tier, but heavy front-end (we use Adobe Flex) Since we use XML for communication with Flex, it seemed more than perfect for me. Writing Spring controllers, Java Beans, DAOs, Ibatis/Hibernate mapping files, and witing XMLSerializers was extremely simple but it would still take up a lot of the developer's time and was tedious.

After I downloaded this framework, it took a few minutes to read the manual and understand it... and it took me just 5 minutes to write my mapping file and generate the beautiful mid-tier code and create the brand new tables with the DDLs generated. All I had to do was put (a) a little logic in the controllers, like using the remoteUser in HttpServletRequest?? to determine what to present to him/her (b) write a few simple joins in the Ibatis sql mapping file.

Kudos to Sunny Liu for coming up with a framework that has shortened my development by a good number of days. I plan on using it for all my forthcoming projects. My next project is to write an application based on existing tables and I know the newer version of this framework allows the backward generation of code.