Old AppFuse ... What Framework is StraightForward Migration?

Question

We started building our website / application back in 2006, and chose to use appFuse 1.9.4 as our application framework. There isn't a direct upgrade path to AppFuse 2.x and now AppFuse has been discontinued.

We're stuck on Spring 2.0 and Hibernate 3.2 and we're using JSTL, along with XFire (and SOAP).

We'd like to upgrade our framework to take advantages of some of the new programming paradigms (like Annotations, and moving to CXF) and allow our programming group more flexibility and faster development cycles.

Grails looks like a possibility, as does Roo.

But, we have more than 850 java source code files and 165k lines of code. On the JSP / JSTL page, we have more than 266 pages and 78k lines of code. Anything that can be done piecemeal would be great, rather than re-writing the majority of the code / framework.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Anthony- I don't know a great deal about AppFuse, but I can comment on porting to Grails. The bottom line is that Grails works best when you go all-in. Grails does support native JSP along with GSP; I've tried to mix legacy JSP and new GSP in the same project but eventually just spent the time to port everything to GSP for ease of maintenance. The controller-layer logic really works best when using Grails controllers (in fact, I'm not sure you can use any other controller frameworks (e.g. Servlets) in Grails). Your service/model layer is probably the best candidate for porting since Grails is very flexible below the controller layer (POJOs, EJBs, Spring Beans, etc.).

So, again without knowing much about AppFuse, my guess is that you'l be able to reuse some of your view layer (at the very least you'll have to modify the pages to use the new controller navigation), you'll have to port the entire controller layer, and you'll be able to reuse most of your service and domain layer.