Struts, Hibernate and Spring Integration ? A Case Study

Abstract

Over the last few decades software development has undergone tremendous radical changes in order to enhance user experience, user friendliness and to widen its scope over large geographical area. The key actors in this arena are two leading IT companies Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, now taken owner by Oracle Inc. who compete on a continual basis for rendering rapid professional software design and development process at the same time incorporating more functionality and focusing strongly towards software maintenance issues. Due to this intense competition, the ultimate beneficiary is a software developer who is tremendously benefited at large. In this review paper, the researcher aims at consolidating the technological advancements that have brought a revolutionary change in corporate software development over last few decades. The main substance of the paper is technological advancements facilitating J2EE application development viz., struts framework, hibernate and spring framework which operate in different layers of scalable N-tier architecture. Each technology has its own merits and de-merits. The researcher attempts to aggregate the benefits offered by the trio in a single J2EE application thereby bringing in best of three worlds to a single application. The application is boosted with powerful struts tag library, persistent layer provided by hibernate and dependency injection or Inversion of Control (IoC) user the same roof. A case study is presented to demonstrate the integration of three diverse technologies, struts, hibernate and spring. JBOSS application server is employed as a container for J2EE components.