Spring Boot with JSF

I have open sourced an application, recently, that I created for my own time tracking and invoicing and published it on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. When I started working on it, I thought about which technology should I use and decided on Spring, more precisely Spring Boot, because that was something that is natural to me as I have used this for many years. But this would only serve a purpose for the middle tier and I still needed to think about what to use for the front end. Trend for the  Spring Boot is to use AngularJS or similar frameworks that would tie in it's capabilities and potentially be deployable on the platforms like Cloud Foundry or similar cloud based solutions. This is due to the fact that these are the stateless solutions, and due to their scalability and ease of deployment they are a good fit for the Spring Boot. However, once we start distinguishing between web applications and enterprise applications, depending on what they need to achieve, I believe that  JSF still plays a big role due to its robustness and number of out of the box components that we can use. PrimeFaces framework is something I have used extensively in the past years and it played well with older Spring implementations, but Spring Boot was not meant to work with this out of the box. I have found a project on the GitHub called JoinFaces to help me with this. JoinFaces incorporate best practices and frameworks from JSF world and allow it to work together with the Spring Boot. In an environment where we will need scalability and multiple server deployments, we would still need a solution to share sessions or create sticky client connections, but for my purpose, this was ideal. So here is the stack that I used:

• JoinFaces
• Spring Boot
• Hibernate (with QueryDSL)
• H2 database
• BIRT reporting engine

These are the basic libraries that allowed me to create an easy deployable solution for the local computer or cloud based application depending on your need. This application still has only one deployable file, but we can easily abstract and create mid tier with business services if we needed micro services type of an app. So why use these components? Let's address my thinking behind each one of these:

JoinFaces

This is the project that ties JSF to Spring Boot and it can be found on this location. In their own words: This project enables JSF usage inside JAR packaged Spring Boot Application. It autoconfigures PrimeFaces, PrimeFaces Extensions, BootsFaces, ButterFaces, RichFaces, OmniFaces, AngularFaces, Mojarra and MyFaces libraries to run at embedded Tomcat, Jetty or Undertow servlet containers. It also aims to solve JSF and Spring Boot integration features. Current version includes JSF and CDI annotations support and Spring Security JSF Facelet Tag support.

Since it includes PrimeFaces and this is my favourite JSF engine, it was perfect for what I was trying to do. It is also up to date and well maintained.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot is the new flavor and trend for the development if you prefer this framework. This is what Maven was to Ant when it came out. The goal here is to pre-configure as many parameters as possible and autodetect dependencies. The whole Cloud Foundry was created to make development and deployment as easy as possible in the enterprise environment. In their own words: Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration.

Spring in general was a revelation when it came out. It made developing in Java something that you can actually like. Using this as a wiring framework for the libraries is a really good fit in my opinion.

Hibernate (with QueryDSL)

Hibernate was always one of my favourite ORM frameworks. In the world where good programmers are difficult to find and where Java developers do not know or understand how to write a proper SQL, Hibernate offers to bridge this gap. Another good thing is that it will adapt to any supported database you can use. The bad thing is that you may not be able to use database specific things (e.g. hierarchy queries) or where you have complex and demanding queries. Hibernate also may not be a good option for optimisation of the complex queries. If your existing database model is also not 'by the book', you may experience additional problems. In their own words, Hibernate is: Hibernate ORM enables developers to more easily write applications whose data outlives the application process. As an Object/Relational Mapping (ORM) framework, Hibernate is concerned with data persistence as it applies to relational databases (via JDBC). 

You may fall back to JDBC from Hibernate in case you need to write database specific queries or write native type of queries.

QueryDSL is a good addition to JPA as it enables for an easy filtering and query structuring where this may be required. I found it to be very helpful. In their own words: Querydsl is a framework which enables the construction of type-safe SQL-like queries for multiple backends including JPA, MongoDB and SQL in Java. Instead of writing queries as inline strings or externalizing them into XML files they are constructed via a fluent API.

H2 database

I have gone through several databases (Derby, H2 and HyperSQL) for this project and H2 for me was easiest to setup, backup, run in shared mode and just support a lot from the SQL standard. Very fast to initialise and super easy to understand. It integrated well into the application and so far I have not seen any issues with it. In their own words: Welcome to H2, the Java SQL database. The main features of H2 are: Very fast, open source, JDBC API, Embedded and server modes; in-memory databases, Browser based Console application, Small footprint: around 1.5 MB jar file size.

BIRT reporting engine

For invoices, I required an open source reporting engine that was free. I looked into two: Jasper Report and BIRT. I started with Jasper as it seemed easier to integrate but once I started doing  development for the subqueries is when the things got 'interested'. They both have a good UI for designing reports but I found BIRT to be easier and faster to work with. The main difference is that Jasper enables absolute positioning of the elements and BIRT does not. With some planning, this really is not relevant. In their own words: BIRT is an open source technology platform used to create data visualizations and reports that can be embedded into rich client and web applications.


In the next few blogs, I will try to explain what I did, how and why. You may find the application that I called My Open Invoice on GitHub.

Thanks