Rhino in Spring

So, I've started a new open source project. Not really started it now, as it's been sitting in various states of incompleteness on my machine since last August, always waiting for the next chunk of time I could spend on it. Well, I'm pleased to announce it's ready now. So, what's it about?

The short story is, I integrated Rhino with Spring.

The longer story is, I implemented a custom controller for the Spring's web application MVC framework that allows you to express in JavaScript control flows that span several HTTP request-response cycles (commonly referred to as "webflows".

Below is the text of the announcement as I posted it on TheServerSide (no link, as it didn't show up yet):

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A new Apache-licensed open-source project, Rhino in Spring aims to integrate the Mozilla Foundation's Rhino JavaScript interpreter for Java with the Spring Framework.

The current release includes a controller component for the Spring Web MVC that allows you to express complex multipage flows in your web applications as server-side JavaScript programs.

You can use all the amenities of a full-blown imperative programming language while designing flows. You can write libraries of reusable code encapsulated into functions (i.e. validators), you can use the familiar for(), if(), while(), switch/case etc. statements to express the control flow, and so on.

Rhino in Spring uses the Rhino's support for continuations to achieve high scalability - when a script is suspended between a response and the next request in the flow, its state is stored in a continuation (think of it as a snapshot of its stack), taking up no scarce system resources (i.e. no physical threads), allowing for any number of concurrently active flows.

Even more so, "old" states are preserved (with configurable expiration policies), so the users can go back and forward using the browser's back and forward buttons, or even split the flow in two using the browser's "New Window" menu, and the framework will take care of resuming the server-side script on each request originating from a backed or split response page at the correct point, with correct values of all variables automatically - no need to disable the back button or use custom navigation links on your pages to keep server and browser state in sync.

In addition to in-memory and JDBC server-side storage of states it even provides a facility for embedding an encoded textual representation of the continuation in the generated webpage, thus moving it to the client and completely eliminating any server-side state storage for the ultimate in scalability. Compression, encryption and digital signing can be enabled to protect the client-side stored continuations from tampering. As an added bonus, you also get generic Spring bean factories for Java Cryptography Architecture public and private keys as well as Java Cryptography Extension secret keys, that you can also reuse elsewhere.