Spring Framework

I've spent the past two days trying to get a distributed secondary Hibernate cache working with a Spring 3 application. The application is web-based running on JBoss 5.1 so I figured the best approach would be to use JBoss Cache, since it's automatically configured and available in JNDI when you use the "all" configuration. Hibernate 3.3.2 is configured inside of Spring using the Annotation-based session factory bean. Because I'm using JTA to manage transactions and Hibernate's current session, I need to make sure that the secondary cache, whatever I choose, is aware of the transaction manager. I originally had EHCache 2.0.1 hooked into Hibernate via Hibernate configuration parameters passed into Spring's bean. I was not setting the cache factory parameter on this bean. Everything works fine in this configuration and it recognizes the JTA transactions. ...

I spent a good 50+ hours on trying to consume a Microsoft WCF secure web service with a Java solution. I tried Spring Web Services, Axis2, and looked at Metro/Tango and decided Axis2 was the "easiest" solution. The web service I'm connecting to implements WS-Security, WS-SecureConversation, WS-Policy, WS-Trust and WS-Addressing (at least) and it's provided through a .NET 3.5 WCF endpoint. It doesn't work. Axis2 can't handle SpNego which is a WCF closed protocol allowing two WCF machines to negotiate the credentials between them. The client has spent way too much money paying me to continue to figure out a Java solution, so I wrote a .NET 3.5 C# client. Took me literally five lines of code and it's working. That's great for .NET developers but a whole lotta horse shit for the rest of the world. I'm hoping Axis2's Rampart module is updated to play nice with WS-SecureConversation and a .NET WCF web service. Until then, I'm using the .NET client to download the data and I'm storing the SOAP body into a database table. On the Java side, I'm still using JAXB2 to unmarshall the data into Java objects and process it through our existing persistence framework. ...

After spending a significant amount of time this week on writing JUnit tests for a Spring Web app, I've come to a conclusion. College courses, even in the grad classes I am taking don't spend enough time on the concepts behind unit tests. Granted JUnit and NUnit has been covered in the classes I've had but really only the testing framework is discussed. Test-driven development (TDD) teaches us how to write a test first, make it fail, stub out your methods, and then code until your test passes. The practicality of TDD in the real world is limited because a requirement is to have your system well designed up front. Getting to a point where you'll know method names ahead of time means you've spent a significant amount of time thinking about the design and analyzing that design. ...

So I spent most of the past few months learning the bleeding edge of the Spring Framework, 2.5.x. The training I went to covered this version, the books I had covered the same. My first assignment? Using Spring 2.0 and Web Flow 1. Talk about crushed. Now I have to unlearn everything and go back to a previous version. This happens a lot, from what I've seen. Companies aren't willing to upgrade because of fear of stuff breaking; but they'll write shit loads of work-around code to keep old solutions working. That eventually bites them in the ass when the product they're on goes off support and they're forced to do a huge conversion. ...