Spring Layout

Introduction

Spring Layout is an Open Source Spring MVC extension that simplifies the development of data-centric web applications. Spring Layout is designed to service a number of common requirements of web applications enabling the rapid development of form based web applications.

Spring Layout capitalises on and continues the Spring MVC "open for extension" design principle making use of the solid MVC framework provided by the Spring Framework and refining it to specialize its use in certain areas without restricting the use of Spring MVC itself.

Spring Layout is perfect for current or future users of Spring MVC who have similar application requirements and wish to speed up and simplify development of their applications.

JSP Tag Framework with Integrated Validation

The Spring Layout tag library offers a wide range of managed controls including all standard HTML form field controls as well as specialized controls such as an editable data grid and date control. These controls all support and integrate with the validation framework specifically designed for the web tier. The tags can easily manage cross field dependencies and due to the tight integration with the validation and security layers the tag library provide rich front end behaviour for validation, errors and message feedback.

The validation framework is capable of validating against fields both on and off the current page making it extremely flexible when developing multi-page forms with front end cross-field validation.

Simplified Handling of Page Modes

Spring Layout tags can display in read mode and edit mode on a single jsp with zero re-coding. This means that pages can display differently depending on user permissions or the requested display mode. Access control can be applied at the page level or on a field by field basis.

Multi-mode is also provided which overrides edit mode and allows for any field to display as if in read mode unless a user with the correct permission clicks on that field at which time it switches to edit mode.

In practical terms this is an immense time saving feature when developing data gathering applications as there is no need to recode JSPs for displaying data gathered in a form in a read only format. Simply switch to read mode and the page will render as text only.

Pluggable Security Layer with Form / Field Tag Integration

Simple page level security is provided through a pluggable Page Access Resolver which can be custom coded to provide page and field level security for specific needs. Security logic is written in Java and injected at the mvc controller level so security can be based specifically around the current command object or any attribute of the current request. The results of Page Access Controller execution is used within the form and field tags to determine display mode for the current page or fields.

Rich Multi-Page Form Framework

Spring Layout adds a multi-page controller to the Spring Layout Controller family. This provides the framework with a multi-page, non-directional or directional wizard style controller. This is designed specifically for multi-page data gathering where large amounts of data is required to be captured in a single process with validation requirements that potentially spans different form pages..

Spring Framework Support

Spring Layout is currently compatible with Spring 1.2.8 & Spring 2.x. The long term support for Spring 1.2.x is unknown at this stage and may be discontinued at our discretion prior to the first official 1.0 release.