Book Review: Spring Web Flow Web Development

Right now there are two trends to develop web applications, either you choose the RIA model or a conversational approach. In the former, say Flex with Cairgorm, both the model and the state is handled by the client. In the later, the server manages the scope sending a view to the browser which acts as a renderer. Of course, interactivity has improved over the years and nowadays partial requests are a must to improve user experience. Spring WebFlow is the SpringSource approach to a server side (work/page) flow management for web applications and Spring Web Flow Web Development, the book, (I could think of better names!) tries to explain how to leverage it.

The task is not minor because, let's face it, Java is a very complex platform and to start with WebFlow you should have a good understanding of JEE (at least JSF and the Servlet APIs), Spring and MVC in general. AJAX is welcome as well. The book, of course, can't help you there (you'd need a whole collection for that). This is not for novices! Fortunately a lot of people have learned JEE and Spring through the years and it's a matter of learning Webflow step by step but in depth.

Now, here the book shines. I like the formating, very clear and clean, and the language, simple and direct. I would have changed the chapter structure a little though. I missed individual chapters for persistence (Security has one) and Spring MVC (Faces has one) and I would have reordered some things here and there (configuration is scattered) but that's subjective and overall the steps make sense. The concepts (flow, action, state, transition, continuation) are well defined and you get a grasp pretty soon but some times the book is too comprehensive like when enumerating the methods and fields of the available variables (messageContext, flowExecutionContext et al). This makes for a hard reading but it will be invaluable as a reference book to some. I prefer IDEs for that task though. In the same sense I missed more diagrams and graphs (I'm not referring to UML class diagrams here). In a book about flows it should be pretty easy to plot concepts using some circles here and there. In my mind, circles are not less valuable than XML snippets (the book has tons of these don't worry) and the reader will gladly accept some pictures to clarify concepts (and thank you for them). Nothing too fancy, this one (extracted from the book) is more than enough:


In summary, the book is extensive and a great tool to learn first, and as a reference guide later, to Spring Webflow. It's dense and it explains lots of concepts in depth. Be warned that to extract all value this book requires previous knowledge of complex notions, among them: Spring, JSF, AJAX, persistence/ORM, Security, unit testing and probably more. The authors have made the effort to introduce all these libraries/skills when they're first used but that just lessens the burden (a bit). All in all, an easy candidate to recommend to those who need to extract all the power that Webflow 2 has to offer or teams that are about to start a new project and need an initial push with the technology.

From http://internna.blogspot.com/