portlet 2.0 (jsr286) development with spring

Question

We are discussing whether it's a good idea to switch from plain portlet development on a liferay installation to spring webmvc portlet based development.

We're starting the development of some portlets soon, so now is the time. But the problem I see is that we'd like to use some of the portlet 2.0 features, which won't work with versions older than spring 3.0. (Right?)

Has anyone insight, if it's worth the waiting? (When is 3.0 scheduled anyway?) Is the current milestone stable enough?

Our first real release will be in the last quarter of the year, so the springsource guys have some time left to get a final out of the door... ;-)

Any ideas?

UPDATE

So, Spring 3 has been released and it supports all JSR286 features we need. (I think it's a pretty complete support for the JSR286 features)

The only drawback I am seeing is the documentation which is not up to speed in regard to the annotations.

Byram

Answer 1

We use Spring Portlet MVC 2.5 on Liferay and we have excellent results. Most of JSR-286 functionality(like events) can be reached be extending DispatcherPortlet class.

There is still a lot of bugs open for upcoming 3.0 release, so I would be rather conservative and stay with stable&mature version 2

Eumenides

3.0 M4 is pretty stable. If your development timescale is over the next few months, I'd say start with 3.0 M4 and hope it's finished by the time you're ready to release. – Demi

Answer 2

The spring framework has an excellent track record of code quality. In the past their M releases were of high quality, so I would not be afraid to use it.

Alar

But as far as I have found informations about the Milestone 2 there are some things still missing, which makes me wonder if this leads to problems or duplicated work in later phases of the project. – Byram

Milestone releases are not intended to be complete - they're milestones. It's not until the RC drops that things are feature-complete. – Demi

Answer 3

Juergen Hoeller gave Jul 2008 as the estimated release date for Spring 3.0:

http://www.springify.com/archives/15

I think they're late. 8)

Matt Raible lamented the fact in Oct 2008, almost six months ago:

http://raibledesigns.com/rd/entry/the_colorado_software_summit_and

I wonder if the new professional versus open source model has affected availability.

They also have the Spring DM, Spring Blaze, and Spring Integration work going on now.

Given their past history of quality releases, I'd bet that they're resisting the urge to release early in order to make certain the code is up to their standards.

Horrendous

A friend of mine told me via twitter that they aim at june 09 and M3 will be release this or next week. I hope that they keep their focus on quality. The image damage with a buggy release would be too big. – Byram

Ah, M3 came out months ago, and M4 was release 2 weeks ago. – Demi

Answer 4

I am just getting to know Portlet MVC with Spring 3.0 M4 and came across a modified PetPortlet sample making use of Spring3 (JSR-286) features and annotations. While it is Mavenized and probably not directly deployable on Liferay, it still provides good examples.

Please comment should you happen to come across any others.

Greenbrier

We simply used spring portlet from 2.5 and avoided all jsr286 features that made changes in the dispatcher necessary. We used public render parameters and application session scope mainly – Byram

Patrick, did you get public render parameters to work through Spring MVC? I couldn't find a reference to them in the documentation or via a quick source code search. As an experienced JSR286/spring-mvc developer, how would you suggest handling the whole cross-page portlet to portlet parameterized communication? – Viosterol