Kirkman Enterprises

 A week or two ago I mentioned the possibility of starting one or two businesses.  The first one would be based on research I have been doing in regards to MSDL (the Manufacturing Service Description Language).  In the research, I have been developing stand-alone Java based applications.  The reason for using Java is because we are heavily dependent upon the OWL API, which is a Java based API for working with Ontologies.  Now that I'm looking ahead to moving this work into a web-based service I have been looking into implementation options.  Of the different web-application frameworks I figured using a Java-based framework would be best.  My thinking is that it would be better to implement the web-based application directly in Java as opposed to creating the web pages and make calls to the Java application stored on the server.  Researching Java-based web-application frameworks it seemed that Spring was most popular; therefore, I decided to attempt to learn it.

I stress that I attempted to learn it.  I am failing miserably.  Spring is released by SpringSource.org and put out version 3.0 of their framework in late 2010.  The most current tutorial that the group has released is for version 2.5.  There were a number of large changes between version 2.5 and version 3.0.  Enough so that the tutorial is outdated in my opinion.  So it is difficult to try to learn the newest version of the framework, in particular the concept of annotations, using "official" tutorial.  I realized this after spending the good part of a weekend working through the, now out-dated, tutorial, dealing with problem after problem until I found out why there were so many problems walking through the tutorial with Spring v3.   I searched the Internet for tutorials written with the Spring Framework v3 in mind.  I found SpringByExample.com which claims they have updated their information for the latest version of Spring.  However, it seems their tutorial is written for someone with Spring experience.  

This has resulted in my being less interested in using Spring as a framework for web-application.  Regardless of its popularity, if it is difficult to find a good tutorial and material for those new to the framework it is useless, in my opinion.  Admittedly, it could be due to my inexperience with web-based applications in general.  I have experience working with content management software like Drupal and have worked extensively on websites with PHP.  The process of creating web-based applications, particularly with Java, requires several new bits of knowledge (XML configuration files, Tomcat, WAR files, etc) that I don't have.  It looks like going to Spring may skip too many steps.  Therefore, I'll start looking for a different framework to learn (Struts 2 perhaps??).  Maybe once I become more knowledgeable with web-applications created with Java I can return to Spring.  But for now, they lack the tutorial documentation to learn the system.