Question

Is there a way to create a “plug-in” framework for web applications that have these features:

Seemless for the developer – can use existing technologies

e.g.

• Spring MVC annotations (e.g. Request Mapping)
• Hibernate / JPA with annotations
• JSP, JSTL, and servlet views

Seperation – class loading, session, http context

• e.g. each @RequestMapping is confined to a subset of the “main” URL (e.g. one “plugin” can’t hijack the URL request of another “plugin” for example the URL http://localhost/rootContext/plugin1/action1?param=value will require a mapping that is relative to the “module” / “plugin” which is “plugin1” and not the root context, so if we have full seperation of http context, I expect the annotation to be @RequestMapping("action1"...)

• also Parent Last classloading so each module can have it’s own jars etc..

• also protection on the session object to avoid overwriting session keys accedently (and for security)

Supports plain old JSPs

• I’d like to have the view tehnology be JSPs, I find them much easier than Freemarker, or Velocity

I thought of Apache Felix, OSGI, Spring-OSGI MVC etc… but still need more information…

Answer 1

Take a closer look at Eclipse Virgo, possibly the best choice for greenfield projects for the moment which want to include Spring and JSP.