Spring MVC 4.0

I have had a post coming for some time on my thoughts experience in starting to play with the changes that come as part of the latest major upgrade to the Spring suite.

There are lots of changes, that were announced at last year's Spring One event - including a flashy new spring.io website and several new packages to the framework such as Spring Boot (which they describe as an oppionated way to start building Spring apps - basically out of the box components that reduce work, but configured to Spring's tastes and conventions).



The interesting parts for me are in Spring MVC (as that is where I don most of my Spring dev) - most notably, the ability to write Spring apps in pure Groovy is of interest (as I do a lot of Groovy dev, and once you get used to the luxuries of its collection based closure functions then its hard to go back!) and also the ability to now configure the Spring Security stuff also entirely programatically (my previous attempt of pure code config spring app were thwarted only by having to use XML configuration for the security).

I am yet to convert an app to Groovy, but I have created a basic web app using the Spring 4.0 Milestone releases and converted the security config to code.  Full source code of the webapp is on github.

I will stick that up on GitHub soon, and when I do I will write in more detail about it (I also played around with LESS on that project and configured MAven/Eclipse to build the LESS/CSS files nicely, which I will also write up soon)

As it happens, I also stuck the demo app up on cloud hosting service AppFog.com (given that CloudFoundry is no longer with us in it's free form.. which kinda sucks, as that was really nice). It's by no means a complete app, and doesn't really do anything - just lets you connect your Facebook/Twitter accounts and see all your contacts etc - but as you can see - there is a lot of filler text and the LogOut link is always in the navbar etc.. But anyway, its here, for now..





  http://socialcrm.eu01.aws.af.cm/