ZK Developer's Guide

Integration with Other Frameworks
So, with all these advantages, it's no wonder that Spring is one of the most used
frameworks. Spring provides many nice features: however, it works mainly in the
back end. Here ZK may provide support in the view layer. The benefit from this
pairing is the flexible and maturity of Spring together with the easy and speed of
ZK. Specify a Java class in the use attribute of a window ZUL page and the world of
Spring will be yours. Remember as discussed in previous chapters what a sample
ZUL looks I like:
Thank you for using our Hello World Application.
The HelloController points directly to a Java class where you can use Spring
features easily.
Normally, if a Java Controller is used for a ZUL page it becomes necessary
sooner or later to call a Spring bean. Usually in Spring you would use the
applicationContext like:
ctx = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("applicationContext.xml");
UserDAO userDAO = (UserDAO) ctx.getBean("userDAO");
Then the userDAO is usable for any further access. In ZK there is a helper class
SpringUtil. It wrapps the applicationContext and simplifies the code to:
UserDAO userDAO = (UserDAO) SpringUtil.getBean("userDAO");
Pretty easy, isn't it? Let us examine an example.
Assume we have a small web application that gets flight data from a flight table. The
web.xml file looks like:
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