Spring MVC and dynamic module deploy

Question

I completed a new MVC web application and my boss asked me to create a new version for a new custumer. Same web application but differente CSS and two new modules (for module I mean a new page used by user to interact with DB). It's not a big deal and quite easy to do, just duplicate the project in my Eclipse and modify it. Two days work and project completed. Well done, all happy but not me.

I was thinking to wordpress, it's really customizable, just create a new template and plugin and activate it. I'd like to do somenthing similar to reduce the new version deploy and the code mainteneance. My question is, how can I do something similar with Spring? or better, is it possible to create a new module and deploy it for a web application? is the Spring dynamic the right option for a MVC Spring application?

thanks,
Andrea

Answer 1

I don't think your approach is correct. You need to discuss with your manager whether this situation is likely to repeat. Because to me it looks like it might.

Let's imagine a scenario: you have a number of copies of your app with some minor enhancements or changes between them. A month later one customer reports about a bug that's really nasty and has to be fixed in every of your app instances. Imagine your pain.

Why don't you approach it with multi-tenancy in mind?

• Implement white-labelling, so that depending on the customer your application can get different looks;
• Extend the backend, so that customers don't ever see each other's data
• Implement configurable features, so that one customer doesn't see extended features that your boss sold to another customer. When he does sell them - it's going to be a matter of toggling a few flags in the database/configs.

Don't want to support multi-tenancy or the product is physically deployed on different (customer) servers? Doesn't matter! If you find a bug, you fix it once and redeploy the jar-file to all the affected systems.

Granted, the above isn't two days of work, but down the road this approach may save a lot more.

As to your question, Spring allows you to customize its looks via changeable styles and layouts. I suggest you to create a sample web app with Spring Roo to see how it's done. However, if I were you I would still aim to have a shared codebase between the projects at the very least.