Using Spring Framework facilitates good, extensible design by promoting interface driven programming, ease of testing through Inversion of Control and supporting various test frameworks and much more. Integrating Spring in a Struts2 based web application is a logical next step. In this post, we will integrate the Spring Framework in the Struts2 web application started in this post – Starting Struts2 web application development (using Maven2 and Eclipse)
In my previous post, How to integrate Spring Framework with a Struts2 application, I created a simple web application that used Struts2 and Spring. In this post, I am going to extend that application to add persistence logic using JPA (Java Persistence Architecture) and Hibernate.
I am assuming that you are already familiar with the technologies used in this post – Struts2, Spring and Hibernate.
My goal is to create a project that can be used to jumpstart a Struts2, Spring and Hibernate based development. This is not a detailed tutorial for these technologies.
My current development environment (at the time of developing this project) looks like this:
Maven provides many archetypes to generate various types of project skeletons. This blog post explains how to create a custom archetype that is tailor-made for your own situation. We will create an archetype for the Struts2 application.
My current development environment includes:
You need to have a starter project from which new archetype can be created. We can start with the Struts2 application created in the blog post Starting Struts2 web application development (using Maven2 and Eclipse) to create a custom archetype for Struts2 based applications. You can download the zipped source code for this project here.