spring-webflow

Spring Web Flow facilitates building web applications with guided navigation use cases such as a shopping cart, flight check-in, a loan application, and many others. In contrast to stateless, free-form navigation that's naturally suited to the web, what these use cases have in common is a clear start and end point, one or more screens to go through in some pre-defined order, and a set of changes that are not finalized until the end point.

A key element of the framework is the ability to define a flow definition consisting of states, transitions, and data. View states for example represent the individual screens of a flow while transitions are caused by events resulting from the click of a button or a link. Data may be stored in scopes such as flash, view, flow, and others where scoped data is automatically cleared when a view state or a flow definition is exited.

In REST terms a flow represents as a single resource. The same URL that is used to start the flow is also used to go through all remaining steps of the flow, along with an execution key that uniquely identifies the current flow instance. As a result individual views remain shielded from the details of navigation and simply point to the flow URL.

Some of the benefits of using Spring Web Flow:

A flow abstraction to model "long conversations" in a web application
Well encapsulated navigation rules
Multiple scopes in which to store data without having to remove it explicitly
Built-in use of POST/REDIRECT/GET pattern to avoid browser warnings
Not possible to return to a completed flow session via back button
Rapid prototyping of flow definitions with changes picked up on the fly in development mode
Flow definition vizualization
and much more...

Downloading artifacts

Instructions on downloading Spring Web Flow artifacts via Maven and other build systems are available via the project wiki.

Documentation

See the current Javadoc and Reference docs.

Samples

The ./spring-webflow-samples/ sub-directory contains several samples that can be built with Maven. More samples can be found in the spring-samples repository: webflow-showcase and webflow-primefaces-showcase.

Getting support

Check out the Spring forums and the spring-webflow tag on StackOverflow. Commercial support is available too.

Issue Tracking

Spring Web Flow's JIRA issue tracker can be found here. If you think you've found a bug, please consider submitting a reproduction project via the spring-webflow-issues repository. The readme provides simple step-by-step instructions.

Building from source

Instructions on building Spring Web Flow from source are available via the project wiki.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome; you'll be asked to sign our contributor license agreement (CLA). Trivial changes like typo fixes are especially appreciated (just fork and edit!). For larger changes, please search through JIRA for similiar issues, creating a new one if necessary, and discuss your ideas with the Spring Web Flow team.

License

Spring Web Flow is released under version 2.0 of the Apache License.