portlet 2.0 (jsr286) development with spring

Question

Hi!

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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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

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.

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.