Pro Spring MVC: With Web Flow

Foreword

I still remember first learning about the Spring framework back in 2004. I had been using J2EE and Struts heavily, and had struggled with many difficulties in effectively using those technologies while building Java enterprise applications. Instead of trying to do away with J2EE altogether, Spring tried to make using J2EE drastically simpler and more productive by offering a large collection of best practice implementations and an inversion of control container gluing it all together. An exciting proposition indeed!

While in general Spring did not try to reinvent the wheel by providing solutions competing with existing parts of J2EE or other established frameworks (notably Hibernate), there was one important exception to this rule: ...