After several years of work, the latest release of the XX Framework is now available.

The major change to the framework is that it is now ported to SpringMVC. This should allow greater flexibility and easier incorporation into existing or new Spring applications.

One of the first comments I heard when I released the framework back in 2006 was “how does this differ from Spring”. I didn’t think it was much like the Spring core, but he must have meant SpringMVC. Over the years, Spring MVC turned out to be one of the few frameworks that made perfect sense in almost every manner (as does Spring itself). Much of the early work on XX, and most frameworks, is in developing the plumbing (servlet routing, data marshalling, transactions, security, etc). This was all built into XX, but Spring already does it and much better I am sure.

A while back, I made the decision to port the framework to sit on top of SpringMVC and let it handle all the plumbing and let XX do what Spring does not: automatically marshall data from the web layer to the database layer and back, and provide an XSL centric view paradigm.

The migration was surpisingly smooth and would have happened much sooner if I can the time or additional resources. After the servlet mapping layer was migrated, most of the XX controller and database functionality just worked as is. The one main change I made was to incorporate Spring Hibernate integration (DAO stuff) and dependency injection.

The framework has powered Domuswap.com, in both its Spring and pre-Spring incarnations. While a site’s performance is certainly related to the hardward available, we did get some 4000 visitor days at its peak.

I still think the key differentiators of the XX framework continue to be valuable. Further integration into Spring is needed to where it is more of a plug in to Spring rather than a separate framework built on top of Spring (like Grails).

Check out the XX Framework.