Spring MVC is one of the leading Java Web application frameworks along with Struts. In the next few blogs, I will take an use case and demonstrate how to develop a good quality web application in an enterprise Java world. I will also demonstrate latest capabilities of Spring like Annotation based configurations and its advantages over XML based configurations. Prerequisite for this application is Java 7.x, Tomcat 7.x, Maven 3.x and STS IDE.
The use case I will be talking about is a Bookstore application, where in user register to this application and purchase books. There is also an administration task like creating the book catalog.
Spring MVC application architecture
For this sample application we extensively use the Latest Spring MVC annotation capability. The major advantage with this is we will not be depending on any xml configuration including web.xml. I personally like XML configuration with namespace, because it is readable. The advantage of annotation is, since everything is Java, if we use STS IDE, any typo can be caught at compilation time, and we can write a good quality code and even measure the code coverage. We also used Kickstrap as the css engine for this application. Here is a blog on Integrating Kickstrap with Spring MVC application.
What is code coverage?
Code coverage is a measure of how well you unit tested your code. If you use a good IDE like STS IDE we can install ecobertura using the update site. Once you setup ecobertura, you can start developing your application. When you run your JUnit test in “Cover as” mode, it will show the code coverage of your JUnit tests as below,
eCobertura STS-IDE view
