Since Hibernate is in CF 9, will Spring be in CF 10?

{ Posted By : Eric Cobb on March 12, 2010 }
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Related Categories: ColdFusion

While going through my morning blog roll, I came across a post where someone mentioned using both CF 9's Hibernate ORM and ColdSpring in an application. This got me to thinking, since Hibernate was incorporated into CF 9, should we expect to see Spring in CF 10 (or another future release of CF)?

To me, this seems like a logical progression. What do you think?

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Brian Kotek's Gravatar I would love to see this. I actually proposed this before the prerelease of CF9 started on the customer advisory board but was rebuffed. Then again, looking back at the heated discussion that ensued at the same time when I proposed adding Hibernate, this may not be surprising. Obviously most people in that discussion were eventually won over to including Hibernate, and I plan to trigger a similar discussion again with regard to Spring.
# Posted By Brian Kotek | 3/12/10 9:52 AM
Eric Cobb's Gravatar @Brian - glad to know you're already working on this. While I think adding Spring in a future release of CF is great, I also feel that trying to have put it and Hibernate into CF 9 may have been too much, both for the Adobe team building CF and the CF community at large.

There are still a lot of non-OO, non-CFC, non-Java ColdFusion coders out there, and getting both Hibernate and Spring at the same time would have caused mass confusion with them and probably less adoption of the features. There's still some people out there that think Hibernate is a useless feature in CF. They don't "get it", and it's going to take a little time to get them to using it.

I think that by first putting in Hibernate and focusing on getting everyone up to speed on it, Adobe then sets everything up so that everyone wants and needs Spring in the next CF release.

I realize that you don't have to have Hibernate to use Spring, but I think that the more Hibernate is used, the more we will realize Spring is needed. What is it they say about ColdSpring, it's the solution to a problem you didn't know you had? (or something like that)

Of course, the flipside of that is that the non-OO, non-CFC, non-Java ColdFusion coders out there aren't going to be using Hibernate/Spring anyway, so it doesn't matter when they get released. ;)
# Posted By Eric Cobb | 3/12/10 10:18 AM
Brian Kotek's Gravatar While I see what you're saying, Eric, I'm not sure I agree. I don't feel it is Adobe's job to drag people ("kicking and screaming") into using Hibernate or Spring. If people don't have the problems that these libraries solve, they may not even need to care. But the people who DO have these problems will find these solutions invaluable.

In other words, I feel that the libraries should be added and the CF developers left with the choice to use them or not. If they choose not to, that's fine. But for many folks, having these options would be incredibly useful.
# Posted By Brian Kotek | 3/12/10 10:22 AM
Chris H's Gravatar Integrating Spring into CF like Hibernate is a nice idea. But just like the ORM features, people who do not want to use them should not be forced to. That was achieved pretty nicely with the new ORM features, so why shouldn't it be possible for Spring?
# Posted By Chris H | 3/12/10 10:50 AM
Eric Cobb's Gravatar @Brian - That's a good point. I guess for the CF guys that already need it, not having Spring can be a real problem. And you're right about it not being Adobe's job to force people to use these features. But I do think that by them introducing these "big" features one at a time, they make it easier for people like me (with no Hibernate/Spring background) to get on board. I guess I'm in the crowd of learning these cool new things as Adobe introduces them instead of already knowing about them and waiting on Adobe to introduce them.

At any rate, I hope that Adobe seriously considers your proposal next time as I think Spring would be a huge hit in CF. Besides, if Adobe would have put Spring in CF 9, we wouldn't have anything to look forward to in CF 10, right? ;)
# Posted By Eric Cobb | 3/12/10 10:58 AM
Henry Ho's Gravatar What kind of feature will we get if CF has Spring?
# Posted By Henry Ho | 3/12/10 11:47 AM
Eric Cobb's Gravatar @Henry - I was curious about this myself. Having never used Spring before, my understanding of it was that it was a Java framework for dependency injection. However, I found this wikipedia entry on it and it appears to do a whole lot more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Framework
# Posted By Eric Cobb | 3/12/10 1:01 PM
Brian Kotek's Gravatar The better question to ask is what does Spring NOT do, because the list of what it does is so vast. Virtually no Java/Groovy/etc. developer would build an application without Spring, and it is built into Grails.
# Posted By Brian Kotek | 3/12/10 1:18 PM
Brian Kotek's Gravatar Not even included in that article are a ton of optional libraries such as Spring-Blaze (http://www.springsource.org/spring-flex), and it's dynamic language support (http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/s...), which on its own would seem to open up a lot of interesting options for integrating CFML with Java or Groovy.

All that said, the core power of Spring is in its IoC and AOP capabilities, which are just awesome (like ColdSpring, but Spring is to ColdSpring what Hibernate is to Transfer).
# Posted By Brian Kotek | 3/12/10 1:23 PM
Eric Cobb's Gravatar @Brian - Nice! Thanks for the clarification. I really hoping this shows up in CF 10 now!
# Posted By Eric Cobb | 3/12/10 1:50 PM
John Allen's Gravatar Spring in CF would be very hip
# Posted By John Allen | 3/13/10 1:00 PM
Mark Mandel's Gravatar I should point out that Spring/ColdFusion integration already exists in the JavaLoader project:
http://www.compoundtheory.com/?action=javaloader.i...

Is anyone taking advantage of it in a production environment?
# Posted By Mark Mandel | 3/13/10 5:23 PM
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