Spring

Spring is a JEE application framework. One of Spring main interest is to glue several components together, taking care of configuration and dependencies between those components. It also serves as a base framework for Grails.

Transaction Support

• It's important to be aware than for Spring managed transactions, rollback occur only if an unchecked exception is thrown. If a checked exception is thrown, the transaction does not rollback.

Locale Support

• Spring supports different mechanisms for determining the current locale (the locale associated to the current thread). Grails uses the cookie mechanism (with a fallback to the HTTP request Accept-Language header).

Obtaining the current HTTPServletRequest

• Obtaining this object in a domain object should generally considered as a bad practice, as it couples the object to an HTTP request. However this can be done using the following code (this works at least in Grails):

import org.springframework.web.context.request.RequestContextHolder as RCH
def request = RCH.currentRequestAttributes().currentRequest

Data Binding

• Spring supports custom data binding for certain classes through the use of PropertyEditors.