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July 29, 2004

Spring is here (again)

And you thought it was summer...

The Spring team just put out their 1.1 release candidate 1. I've been working with this from CVS head for a couple of weeks now (as a smooth project check-out and build process, especially if you are working in Eclipse, Spring is top-of-the-class) and the AspectJ support just blows me away.

I was working on a three-tier application, rich-client with a business middle-tier and a set of DAOs managing persistence. As you can imagine, plenty of aspects helping me keep it all under control. I drew myself an object diagram of the key runtime objects in the solution (some of them are aspects), and then was able to translate the diagram straight into a bean configuration file and move all of the configuration code out of the application. When you put the object diagram next to the beans.xml file, the mapping is just so clear - one of those magic moments in software development.

Here's a sample extract from the file that shows just how easy this now is...

...
<bean id="businessRulesValidation"
        class="org.xyz.app.model.validation.BusinessRulesValidation"
        factory-method="aspectOf">
    <property name="validators">
      <ref bean="policyValidator"/>
      <!-- ... -->
    </property>
</bean>
...

(BusinessRulesValidation is an aspect...)

Great job guys, thanks :)

Posted by adrian at July 29, 2004 08:30 PM [permalink]

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