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I need to port a legacy internal Java EE application (JSPs, EJBs/stored procedures, Weblogic) over to a newer Java web framework and revamp the features/UI substantially. I'm somewhat limited because the backend will remain Oracle Stored Procedures (no direct SQL), so that rules out many ORM/JPA technologies.

At this point, I'm leaning towards using Spring JDBC to wrap the stored procedure access and a combination of Spring MVC, REST & perhaps Twitter Bootstrap for the frontend. Overall, I'd like to be better positioned to support iterative/agile feature development, etc.

Any other (Java) web technologies worth looking into?

dimitrisli
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Ben ODay
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2 Answers2

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This is just my humble opinion, I would recommend looking into Grails. Although it sounds like you won't be able to leverage GORM, Grails still provides an excellent MVC framework approach, and the convention-over-configuration means that you do not need to deal with the XML configuration files and/or annotations that you do with many other frameworks.

Here is another Stackoverflow post regarding Grails without Gorm: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4600991/463196

In Grails, Taglib support is great (writing custom Taglibs has never been easier) and the plugin ecosystem is incredible.

Also, Groovy means not having to write a lot of the boilerplate getter/setters, overloaded constructors of old. The easiest line of code to support is the one that was never written.

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Philip Tenn
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    +1 to this. In the past 2 years I've had to write 2 x new front-ends to existing systems (backend - communicating via web services) and I did one in Spring MVC and the other with Grails (no GORM). Would definitely go with Grails if doing it again. – nickdos Sep 06 '12 at 01:37
  • Grails does look interesting, but we already have a lot of domain/dao/utility Java classes that we need to reuse and I don't see how that would fit with Grails easily... – Ben ODay Sep 06 '12 at 04:37
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    Here is a very good response to integrating existing Java code with Grails. http://stackoverflow.com/a/896288/463196. I haven't done this myself, but it is a very well-thought out answer that bears looking into, should you choose to go the Grails route. – Philip Tenn Sep 06 '12 at 13:47
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I know this is not really an answer to your question since you've given it already. But from personal experience on similar setups (Java EE/Oracle stored procs/functions) I cannot recommend enough the combo you've suggested with Spring Core/MVC and SimpleJdbcCall to link to your existing Oracle stored procs. I particularly like this setup since it scales very nicely and you can start refactoring bit-by-bit non-intrusively.

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dimitrisli
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  • what about the templating technology...I've used Freemarker in the past...are there any better options out there? – Ben ODay Sep 08 '12 at 16:26
  • I've used Freemarker and Velocity in the past but I tend to prefer Velocity because of its syntax simplicity and the addons provided through VelocityTools – dimitrisli Sep 09 '12 at 11:00