Is Spring the right choice for me?

Question

I want to start developing a small web game, and I will be grateful for some advice before I enter it. Hope this is the place to ask!

The game is basically a fantasy football game in which you create a team of players competing with other users. Nothing unusual.

I didn’t code very much from college, and I am very rusty. I want to code in Java for two reasons:

• This is the language I am most familiar with.
• What limited development work I have done since college was in Java (I have experience new to Tomcat and Glassfish, i.e. I launched them and deployed the basic webapps that I encoded from scratch).
• I really like what I saw in the GWT framework, so I would like to develop my GUI with this.

The last time I programmed was about 3 years ago when I wrote a web interface for a crappy support system that only had a thick client and a web API. This was done in Java.

So basically, first, I want to run a skeletal game. Basically allow the user to log in, see their team, log out. Therefore, my questions begin with:

• Is there any specific development infrastructure I should read? I saw Spring recommended - is this a good choice? I found this to get started if it is a suitable choice: http://static.springsource.org/docs/Spring-MVC-step-by-step/
• What is the easiest way for me to handle login / authentication / authorization without having to write my own security system? Hope there is some kind of structure / library that I can just go into the code? Or Spring Protect the handle of this?
• I really like GWT - are there any difficulties with integrating with Spring?

Thanks so much for your time, I really appreciate it!

Answer 1

• Spring is a good choice.
• Check out the Spring Security Module. It is based on aspect-oriented programming ideas.
• It looks like Spring supports GWT. This is relatively new (May 2010).

If you're rusty with Java, you might want to minimize the new technologies that you introduce at a time.

Java is an object-oriented language, so you can write the objects you need to simulate the game and run them without any interface or database. This will allow you to focus on the game, objects and use cases without having to turn around the axis using the user interface, security, perseverance, etc.

After you have figured out and fully tested, you can pay attention to other functions: persistence, user interface, security, etc.

Perhaps you can try basic authentication / authorization before diving into Spring Security.

If you bite off too much at once, you will never do it. Take small steps.

Answer 2

Spring is an example of what cool kids don't like in Java. Many, many configuration files that make every aspect of the application customizable, but hard to keep in mind where the material belongs. If you are not a huge company, this is almost certainly not what you need.

I would advise you to check out Play or Wicket if you want to keep using Java. Both are conceptually simpler, do not throw into the kitchen sink and are highly website oriented. Spring MVC is just part of the very large Spring ecosystem.

Answer 3

For Inversion of Management ( Dependency Injection ), the paradigm Spring is often associated with, I find Guice more fun.