From one Spring Controller to Another

It's been a BUSY week for me. I'm heads-down on my current project trying to get some code cranked out before next Wednesday. I'm not sure I'm going to make it, but I'm giving it hell.

I'm using the Sring Framework and its MVC layer on this project. I ran into a problem where I wanted to do some work with one controller and forward the result to another controller. It turns out, that ain't exactly pretty in this version of Spring MVC. It's actually a problem that Spring Web Flow is going to solve. Unfortunately, it's too late for me to pull the plug and switch to Web Flow.

I found Tamer Salama's Weblog post about Spring controller forwarding extremely useful. FYI - I went with the RedirectView option, but I put my information on the URL as parameters.

SiteMesh Is Lovely

Aaron, my coworker, has a great post about SiteMesh vs. Tiles. The project that he's referring to is the one we've been working on together. SiteMesh is one of the tools that has made the project a joy so far.

I think Aaron's assessment is right on. However, I will clarify one thing with his statement about third party tag libraries. The problem wasn't that SiteMesh was filtering out the custom tags. The problem was that SiteMesh was filtering out the HTML/JavaScript generated by the Alphablox tag because it was in the "head" portion of the decorated JSP. To work around this, we set up a special decorator to put the Alphablox tag in the head of the decorator instead of relying on it being in the decorated page.

Like Aaron, I really like SiteMesh and hope to use it again on my future projects.