Jakarta Struts Cookbook

10.6. Integrating Spring with Struts

Problem

You've heard about the Spring framework and want to use it with your Struts application.

Solution

There is no better way of learning than by doing. This recipe shows you how to apply Spring to the struts-example web application.

Discussion

There are many ways to use Spring. The Solution shown here uses Spring for two main purposes:

• To configure portions of the model

• To inject model dependencies into Struts Actions

  Tip

  Spring is an active project. You may find that APIs, filenames, and XML schemas have changed since this book was published; however, the basic process should be about the same.

Here's what you need to do:

1. Download the Spring framework from http://www.springframework.org. At the time of this writing, Version 1.1 had just been released.

2. Download the Struts 1.2.4 source distribution.

3. Copy the Struts libraries, struts-example classes, struts-example web resources, and struts-example configuration files into a web application directory structure.

4. Copy the spring.jar file from the downloaded Spring framework into the web-application's WEB-INF/lib folder.

Now that you've got these mundane preliminaries out of the way, you can get to the gist of Spring. The first thing you are going to do is change the MemoryDatabase used by the struts-example to be managed and loaded by Spring instead of by a Struts plug-in.

In the struts-example, the MemoryDatabasePlugIn loads and opens the MemoryUserDatabase. To use Spring instead of this plug-in, you need ...