A review of “Spring Web Flow 2 Web Development” book from Packt.

About Spring Web Flow

Spring Web Flow allowing us to represent the UI flow in (part of) a web application in a clear and simple way. It has several advantages:

• The UI flow in a web application is clearly visible by looking at the corresponding web flow definition (typically in an XML file).
• Web Flows can be designed to be self contained. This allows you to see a part of your application as a module and reuse it in multiple situations.
• Web Flows can define any reasonable UI flow in a web application, always using the same consistent technique. You’re not forced into using specialized controllers for very particular situations.

About this book:

“Spring Web Flow 2 Web Development” by Markus Stäuble, Sven Lüppken (from Packt) is a very good book to start with Spring Web flow. I got a chance to go through this book and I thought of writing a small review about this book in my page.

Just like the main well known Spring books, this book is also approaching learning by doing a small project.  In the entire book we are developing a small project (bug tracking system) and through that we are trying to learn web flow.

The source code for the book can be download from HERE .
Publisher: Packt Publishing (March 20, 2009)
Language: English

Authors: Markus Stäuble, Sven Lüppken

TO BUY THIS BOOK (Click on the Pic): 

Whats special in this Book?

• The book is different in some cases like it does not only explain how to create flows with Spring Web Flow, but also shows the integration with other technologies like JavaServer Faces, EasyMock, Hibernate, Spring Security.
• Explains web flow example project which is using so many other technologies, tools and frameworks like Maven/Ant, Eclipse/Netbeans IDE, Easymock, Apache Tiles etc etc.

Advantages:

• More importantly it covers latest version and advantages of Spring Web Flow.
• “Spring Web Flow 2 Web Development” is special in one case. They are started with the Installation and set-up of the whole environment. As a programmer it will help you very much. (although they are proving Code).
• It starts from the very basics and moves on further.
• Explains things with Maven/Ant, eclipse/Netbeans. This sounds very good.
• This book explains the integration of Spring and Java Server Pages very clearly. And it  also explains the Spring web flow and Faces integration. This may consider an added advantage of this book.
• Authors are given Class diagrams also for our reference in many framework class cases. This helps us to get a full idea about that class and the functionalities that provides.
• It also also explains the essential modules of the complete Spring framework stack.
• Given the complete configuration files and details of flows and others. This helps us to get the overall picture of the configurations.
• Given so many reference links to follow. This also given at each specific parts of the book where that respective technology explains.
• Explains Spring Java Script. It is really good to find some tutorial about that Library framework. Though it is coming through Spring Web Flow 2, a very few authors touches it in their books.
• Another great advantage is it covers Spring Security. Gives us a chance to learn about this Library.
• Apache Tiles integration and configuration is also covered although the book.
• It also covers Unit testing of this Spring Web flow using EasyMock. This is really good point with respect to developers point of view.
• It gives us an idea about running in the SpringSource dm Server (modular OSGi -Open Services Gateway initiative).

Disadvantages:

• In the installation chapter we are coming across a lot of frameworks/tools. If you are a person who knows most of them then that chapter will be easy for you. Otherwise you need a bit more time to understand that.
• Missing Spring IDE explanation.
• Not much information about Spring basics. That’s seems to be Okay because they mentioned it as a book for the people who knows Spring.
• The code mentioned in the book follows the same font. If they would have make the syntax/code highlighted/with some sort of separation  then that would have been great to read.
• One basic thing about the formatting. Paragraphs are not JUSTIFIED. May be  that affects the code snippets. But surely this is making a bit bad look for the entire book in my view.