Is JCatapult a lightweight Spring?
The google code project released its RC2 two weeks back and boasts that the framework is currently being used on many live projects. From what I see, JCatapult, just like Spring, is a collection of frameworks. And the good thing in it is that it has the power to cater to the technological needs of even a large scale project.
Webwork has always proved that it is the best framework. Struts 2.0, therefore, cant be any better. Hibernate for ORM, Guice for dependency injection, Freemarker for templating, a brand new feature “Modules” (yet to give it a try) which enables plugging of features into the main webapplication — all sounds very good.
IMHO, there are a couple of notable differences between Spring and JCatapult though JCatapult might have an altogether different vision.
1) Spring gives more flexibility. So, you get to choose whatever set of tools/frameworks you need to use. I am really not sure how hard will it be now to switch the front end to a desktop application than Struts 2.0. I dont personally like Spring Webflow but would prefer Struts 2.0 for that. But if i really wanted to use something totally different, Spring will still make sense.
2) JCatapult should be very good for new projects considering the fact that the whole list of frameworks extensively use annotations. The ground reality is that many companies still use Java 1.4 compliant web/application servers. Spring, on the contrary, still supports 1.4 and becomes a first class candidate for “pluggable” modules of the already existing applications.
But still, JCatapult is just in its release candidate and it is not fair enough to compare it with a more mature framework like Spring. The documentation also gives us clues that it will support more and more frameworks in the future.
But isn’t it “reinventing the wheel”?
