Those familiar with Spring may mistakenly assume Spring WebFlow is the same as Spring MVC. It's not. Spring MVC is a lightweight framework for Web application development, while Spring WebFlow introduces a whole new value proposition. It enables Web application architects to focus on the more abstract concerns of Web application development: the structure of logical Web flows and the definition of Web event conditions. Furthermore, it introduces new concepts such as continuations (more on those shortly).
This article reviews some of the key concepts behind this upcoming framework, examining the major compositional elements of the flow markup language in the context of the sample login sequence flow, and explaining why WebFlow is an attractive framework. (Readers must have a basic knowledge of the Spring framework release 1.2.)
Spring WebFlow Concepts and Components
As a Web framework, WebFlow has advantages in both conceptual and practical terms. It is grounded in sound software engineering concepts that promote consistent and solid architectures, and its components are logical, easy to understand, and easy to work witheven on a large scale.In fact, the framework is best suited for medium-sized to large applications development because its component model is optimized for architectural reuse and effective manageability and configurability.
Figure 1. WebFlow's State Machine |