Hi all,
I'd like to call methods of my DAOs by AJAX. I'm quite new in that so I would like to ask what is the best way to do that. Is it possible to publish my beans as web services and call them with e.g. jQuery? I think it is not possible :) I've also read about Direct Web Remoting but I don't know which way to go...
As I see, there are lot of experienced guys here so I think you can show me direction.. thanks in advance
You have to expose your DAO's or beans by means of http. Typically you create a layer above the DAO layer to expose your services through HTTP, which are available to any AJAX framework such as jQuery. What jQuery and other frameworks ends up doing is using a special asynchronous request called XMLHttpRequest and then parse the server response (can be anything, pure HTML, JSON, XML, etc) and process it.
Here's a link I found that shows Spring & DWR with AJAX: Bram Smeets Blog.
Rather than exposing your DAO beans directly, you should create some Spring MVC controller beans, and call those from the client-side (using AJAX). Ideally, the controllers should not call the DAOs directly, but should instead call service beans (and the service beans should call the DAOs). One advantage of this approach is that you can define your service methods to be transactional, i.e. whenever a service method begins a transaction is started, and whenever a service method returns (without an exception) the transaction is committed. If the boundaries of your transactions are your DAO methods then it is not possible to wrap several database calls in a single transaction.
Of course there's no reason why you need to use Spring MVC - any web framework would suffice.