HSE 1.1 – Hibernate, Spring and Echo2

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, July 12, 2006 @ 9:00 am

Let a hundred flowers bloom, let one hundred schools of thought contend. -- Chairman Mao

Maybe it's not a good idea to have so many AJAX UI frameworks contending for our attention; it confuses users and has people sitting on the sidelines waiting for things to shake out. The same can not be said of AJAX application frameworks -- frameworks that provide you with the infrastructure to write full featured n-tier applications. In my opinion there aren't enough of those.

I've been watching the development of HSE -- Hibernate, Spring, Echo2 -- and it's already come together into something pretty useful. Right now it's more of a sample application that you can use as a starting point for developing your own application. If you haven't come across these various tools before, let me give you a quick overview of each of them in turn:

• Hibernate - an Object Relational Mapping tool that allows you to map Java Objects to RDBMS tables. There are a ton of these types of tools, both commercial and open source. Hibernate is so slick and featureful it's pretty much killed the commercial market here.
• Spring Framework - this is the one framework whose main purpose is to allow you to design better software. From their mission statement: OO design is more important than any implementation technology, such as J2EE. After using it, you'll wonder how you ever developed applications the old way. I strongly urge you to check this one out, even if you decide not to investigate HSE further.
• Echo2 - Java AJAX component GUI framework that allows you to write web applications the way you do Swing programs.

By combining these tools, the HSE framework already sports some useful features:

• User and group based authentication and entitlements/permissions.
• Input validation with AJAX alert dialogs.
• Sample UI for managing users, groups and permissions.

A short but promising list. I'd like to see it fleshed out a bit with things like a workflow facility, support for messaging and asynchronous processing (see Mule ESB for some ideas), and scripting (Groovy, anyone?). If you're a developer out there thinking of rolling your own AJAX framework, I'd like to encourage you to supress that urge and contribute to a GUI framework like Echo2 or an application framework like HSE. Don't reinvent the wheel when so many new widgets and tools are waiting to be invented.

Related posts:

1. New Echo2 Tutorial Series
2. Built-in Debugging Tool in Echo2
3. Using Hibernate with ZK
4. Echo2 a Cult?
5. IDE Watch: Echo2 Module for NetBeans

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