Can we use Spring Framework on our CD (deployer/presentation website) instead of "out of the box" hibernate framework shipped with as part of installation media?
Though I understood it is going to be an unsupported scenario, I would like to know if any of you have used this combination(CD+Spring) successfully in your projects? If yes, please share your inputs and what needs to be take care while doing so?
Thanks!
Hibernate is used internally in Content Delivery, but it doesn't require you to use it for your website. You cannot remove the usage of hibernate either, though.
The only way to know this for sure is to update the version of the Spring dependencies in your project and see whether it compiles. If it does, then that's a good step forward. However, under the hood Spring uses specific versions for pretty much everything (like Hibernate, as the others are also saying), so the next step would be to actually run the web application on a Tridion stack to see what breaks.
In general, Spring tends to be compatible between minor versions. So, the 3.X version should be able to be used up until the latest minor version, which at the time of writing is Spring 3.2.14 of the Spring version 3 branch. That in turn should work with Tridion 2013 and Hibernate 4.1.
Going a major version up (so, Spring version 4.x) will probably be more problematic, as quite a lot of interface definitions will have changed, let alone actual functionality. Again, you can try this out, but personally I see it as a waste of time, if you have full control over your dependency management.
More information on Spring compatibility can be found here:
I guess it depends a bit on what exactly you want to accomplish, as Peter indicates, you cannot remove the usage of hibernate, but you can use Spring MVC for your web application.
DXA Java (under development right now, will be released this month, October 2015) is an open source Spring MVC web application using SDL Tridion as its CMS.
Check out the beta release in the development branch on SDLs GitHub account: https://github.com/sdl/dxa-web-application-java/tree/develop
