XX
Framework V2.0 is Released
originally posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
After several years of work, the latest release of the XX
Framework is now available.
The major change to the framework is that it is now ported to
SpringMVC. This should allow greater flexibility and easier
incorporation into existing or new Spring applications.
One of the first comments I heard when I released the framework back
in 2006 was “how does this differ from Spring”. I didn’t think it was
much like the Spring core, but he must have meant SpringMVC. Over the
years, Spring MVC turned out to be one of the few frameworks that made
perfect sense in almost every manner (as does Spring itself). Much of
the early work on XX, and most frameworks, is in developing the plumbing
(servlet routing, data marshalling, transactions, security, etc). This
was all built into XX, but Spring already does it and much better I am
sure.
A while back, I made the decision to port the framework to sit on top
of SpringMVC and let it handle all the plumbing and let XX do what
Spring does not: automatically marshall data from the web layer to the
database layer and back, and provide an XSL centric view paradigm.
The migration was surpisingly smooth and would have happened much
sooner if I can the time or additional resources. After the servlet
mapping layer was migrated, most of the XX controller and database
functionality just worked as is. The one main change I made was to
incorporate Spring Hibernate integration (DAO stuff) and dependency
injection.
The framework has powered Domuswap.com, in both its Spring and
pre-Spring incarnations. While a site’s performance is certainly related
to the hardward available, we did get some 4000 visitor days at its
peak.
I still think the key differentiators of the XX framework continue to
be valuable. Further integration into Spring is needed to where it is
more of a plug in to Spring rather than a separate framework built on
top of Spring (like Grails). | 
