Intro to Spring Web Flow 2

Keith Donald and his team has release the latest version of Spring WebFlow (SWF) on middle of May 2008. This latest version of SWF is being upgrade to version from version 1.0.x as some major features being added to SWF v2.

The concept of SWF is simple:
In SWF, a flow consists of a series of steps called “State”. Entering a state results in a view being displayed to user. On that view, user event occurs that are handled by the state. These events can trigger transitions to other states which result in view navigation.

Here is an overview os SWF v2:

Spring Web MVC

• SWF is building on top of Spring Web MVC as it provides fundation for developing web application with Spring using MVC paradigm.

Spring Web Flow

• SWF is MVC extension, allows to define Controller using Domain-Specific-Language.
• Domain-Specific-Language is designed to model user interaction that required several requests into server to complete, or may be invoke from different context.

Spring JavaScript

• Javascript abstraction framework consists of public JavaScript API with implementation that builds on Dojo.
• SWF2 distribution includes ease of integration between Spring JavaScript and Spring Web MVC for processing Ajax requests.

Sprint Faces

• contains Spring’s support for Java ServerFaces.
• use JSF as view technology within Spring MVC and SWF Controller.