I am hoping someone can paint a picture for me as I do not really understand the relationship between Struts2 + Spring + Hibernate. The reason I know about Spring is every book or tutorial I can find with Struts2 and persistence uses Spring.
Background is my last programming in Java was 9 years ago with Struts – I really enjoyed it and now I’ve to write a new web app so I chose Struts2. Over the past two weeks I’ve spent more time learning Hibernate, Ant, something called Maven, I bought a Struts book that use Maven and now I’ve to understand something called Spring! I thought this was going to be easier than Struts 1 with JDBC and writing my own SQL. It’s not programming its learning frameworks! Anyway back to my question. I understand Struts2 quite well now, I can make forms and produce success pages. Everything is transient. I now need to add some persistence so I am using Hibernate (as its seems to be the bees knees). After much reading of a large book about Hibernate I understand how that works…. What I don’t get is how my Struts2 action talks to Hibernate. I've added a Listener to my web.xml for Hibernate, but not sure when that is used. I have a HibernateUtil that creates a SessionFactory which I understand is used for transactions with the database. I want that guy to start when my web app is started in Tomcat so all I have to do is go to him to make a DB connection. But how do I get a session from the factory within a Struts2 Action? It seems odd to put code into each Action to do this. I imagine people more clever than I solved this problem. I figure this is where Spring comes in with Inversion of Control or some other concept I’ve started reading about. I've read this guy http://struts.apache.org/2.0.11/docs/struts-2-spring-2-jpa-ajax.html This PersonService object seems like a hokie solution. Do I make a Service for each object I want to persist? Thats a bit mad. I have to define all of these services in Spring too? I’m already defining a bunch of Hibernate mapping xml file for each object I want persisted… I'm writing more XML than Java. Also how come I’m defining the database connection details in Spring when I have them in my hibernate.cfg.xml ? I think what is lacking is an explanation of why certain things are done the way they are (it’s supposed to be a tutorial…for beginners). Even those tutorial writing guys over at RoseIndia don't seem to have nailed this. I understand Tomcat, Web Apps with Servlets & JSPs. Spring seems to wrap itself around Hibernate. Tomcat somehow makes Spring go, which in turn does the Hibernate bit. I don’t see how my Actions in Tomcat get to the database via Hibernate any easier with Spring. I read this guys post here http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/struts-user/200709.mbox/ So I’m pretty certain I need to be using Spring. To me it seems like Spring is a pre-requisite for Java development. Maybe I need to be drinking the Spring Kool-Aid. Any help so I can get back to making my web app would be much appreciated. Thanks, Peter -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/How-do-my-Actions-get-to-Hibernate-so-they-can-persist-my-objects--tp22404876p22404876.html Sent from the Struts - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: user-unsubscr...@struts.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: user-h...@struts.apache.org
