Summa

A lot of folks have used the Spring framework to build applications - and what’s not to love? It’s allowed us to solve enterprise problems with a minimum of tedium. And the framework has evolved to address criticisms, for example the continued reduction in need for lengthy XML configuration in application contexts in favor of ever more terse syntax and support for code annotations.

The framework as-packaged includes facilities to help with many common aspects of contemporary application development, from a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework to  integration with persistence managers and elegant transaction management. But it doesn’t necessarily cover every need. One example of a gap is batch processing.

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We have all been in projects where we use a combination of open source libraries, for different components of our architecture. We know theoretically that it should work, but alas, something blows up at runtime. If we’re lucky, we experience this on a weekly basis, but we don’t get lucky that often. The “Conundrum Solved” series will tackle some of these hair-pulling, sleep-depriving, grouch-inducing problems some of us at Summa have encountered in our projects. We hope that by sharing them with you, you’ll keep your hair, get enough sleep, and maintain a smile on your face!

Problem: Invalidly getting an InvalidStateObjectStateException thrown upon calling  merge(), even if there were no updates to the entity.

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Think it’s a weird kind of question? Not for people who have worked (or are working) on applications that are moving from one framework to another. I happened to work on one such project where a transition from Struts to Spring MVC was being done over a few releases. Not unexpectedly, this approach of supporting two frameworks at the same time gave the development team its own share of interesting challenges. And one such issue was how to use a new technology i.e. Spring themes in both frameworks, of course we could choose not to use it in enhancements to legacy Struts based application flows but then that would have meant doing the enhancements twice.

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What could be simpler than property files? In an enterprise application, it turns out, many things! In this post I’ll take a look at a few subtle complexities to managing properties in an enterprise Java Spring application, and hopefully demonstrate how a little fore-thought in design can yield big savings in terms of time, confusion, bugs, and gray hair down the road.

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