Customer Reviews

The Definitive Guide to Spring Web Flow (Expert's Voice in Web Development)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The first thing about The Definitive Guide to Spring Web Flow that I noticed, and the book was very up front about, it only covers Spring Web Flow v1.0. In the introduction it states that this book only intends to cover the core concepts about Spring Web Flow and the details about v1.0. It states that v2.0 is dramatically different and is a subject for another book. If you're starting out in Spring Web Flow then you might want to pass on this book and look for another book that specifically focuses on the Web Flow v2.0. However, if you have a need to learn v1.0 this may be a book for you.

The book starts out with an introduction to what Web Flow is and how to get it setup. It then proceeds to explain the basics of web flow and how to get the jars and setup an IDE. I think that this part is a little overkill since anyone with enough Java knowledge should know how to add the dependencies through Maven, Ivy or to manually copy of few jars and add them to your classpath. From there it takes you through the background of what is a web flow and how to plan a web flow in the code. From entry points to exceptions it covers the necessary points to get going with Spring Web Flow v1.0. Chapter 8 gets into the testing of a web flow and how to mock out the flow objects. This takes the unit testing to a new level in my case since in our traditional web applications that I have worked on we have not come close to testing the flows of a page with unit tests. At best we have only tested the individual pages in isolation. The next chapter walks you through an example application. Where other chapters may have left you wondering how to do something with minimal examples this is a full detailed application to get you started with Spring Web Flow. I wish more books would take this concept of using one full chapter and go through a application from start to finish like this.

The book continues on with some real world use cases and a short piece about how to extend web flow to meet any special needs that you may have. The real world cases was nice but I didn't get much from that as I know where web flow will fit into the tools that I need it to and where I'm going to use it. The extending web flow chapter was a good quick coverage of how to manipulate the web flow for you unique cases. Maybe I read this part too quick, too late at night or the editors got to it and remove too much but I thought that it was lacking some of the good detail that was presented in the other chapters.

Overall, I do recommend this book with the caveats that you understand that this is about Spring Web Flow v1.0.


Brian Hurley
[...]

Having been released after webflow 2.0 was released, it was quite misleading to not have much information on which version of webflow this book covered. The book goes over spring webflow concepts well and that's what the 2 stars are for. Unfortunately, most of the examples are 1.x related and therefore outdated.

I wouldn't purchase a copy of this book. Online references will prove more current and relevant.