Comments on: Using Spring 3.0 MVC for RESTful web services (rebuttal)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 07:17:00 +0000

I don’t think this is possible.

By: Stankovic Vlada

Stankovic Vlada — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 13:44:00 +0000

Is it possible to have same url mapping in two different controllers?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 21:02:00 +0000

Hmm, I haven’t tried returning a bean from an exception handler (certainly interesting!). Did you file a bug yet?

By: Sven Haiges

Sven Haiges — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 12:26:05 +0000

Did you have the problem htat an @Exceptionhandler needs to write out an exception message in either json or xml? That is another unsupported feature, e.g. you cannot return a bean from an exception handler and expect it to be automatically serialized to xml or json based on the incoming accept header.

By: AndyC

AndyC — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 08:56:06 +0000

Re “Same relative paths in multiple @Controllers not supported”. Is this because of the way that the @Controllers were discovered? Have you got a that is picking up both @Controllers i.e. can you configure the base-package (or some other attribute) so that only the right controllers for each servlet are discovered?

Re “@ExceptionHandler is controller-centric”. I believe that is intentional. You can configure global exception handling behaviour via HandlerExceptionResolvers.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:03:27 +0000

These are excellent points that need to be publicised more. Spring guys are hard at work promoting their MVC framework as comparable with JAX-RS even though it is not. Please add a link to this page in the reply section of the InfoQ article that you mention.

By: Florin

Florin — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:43:23 +0000

Personally I think yes, it was worth it. If nothing else, it suddenly clarified the layer separation in our app and created the opportunity for a drastic refactoring move where DTOs and controllers along with all top-level validation were consolidated into one logical tier, leaving the services tier free from any view-related logic and concerned only with the core domain.

Arguably a proper REST service implementation using RESTEasy would achieve the same goals I posted above but with our @Controllers being POJOs now, a port to any proper JAX-RS implementation means refactoring only annotations and nothing else. This newly acquired portability freedom makes the choice of any such technology being based on aspects like performance and integration options (i.e. does it support Commons HttpClient or Mina?) rather than implementation details.

By: Josh Devins

Josh Devins — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:10:52 +0000

So, overall, would you say that your move was worth while? I’m thinking you should present this transition to the other teams maybe with a pros and cons of switching, why you switched, etc.