title: Migration to Spring project from JSP/Servlet/Portlets(Jetspeed) - application design
body: <p>I am in process of migrating existing jsp/servlet/portlet(jetspeed) based application to spring. Me and my colleague are the only developers to design, code, deploy and maintain applications (The reason i listed duties is not to show off but rather to explain my responsibility and impact of my actions). Wanted to be wary of my initial application design &amp; architecture before it is too late to realize. The existing web application is already being used worldwide. I have encountered few questions while designing new application.</p>
  
  <p>1) Number of webapps to squeeze the application into: Currently, i have 5 webapps. If required, all of these can be clubbed into one webapp that helps to avoid additional coding to share data between them upon migrating to spring. However, do not want to compromise on the scalability &amp; maintenance. For an instance, do not want to deploy whole war file for a single class change. My question: What are the factors that need to be considered while designing and chosing one vs more than one webapps?</p>
  
  <p>2) Data sharing between webapps: In case of having more than one webapp, data need to be shared. I am thinking of the solution that is less abstract. I am comparatively new to spring and currently share data between webapps by filters &amp; request objects between two contexts. Was able to find couple of posts like (
  <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10339174/how-do-you-share-spring-beans-between-different-spring-contexts">How do you share Spring beans between different Spring contexts?</a>) but do not want to end up in too much of abstraction until i am aware of spring. But, again i realize that comparatively its difficult to implement changes at the later stages of project. My Question: Any other ways of sharing data between different spring contexts with less abstraction? </p>
  
  <p>3) Version of spring to use. Sure the latest due to its features but wanted to chose the one that has more community support. I do not see in near future that i need to use all the advanced features of spring in latest releases.</p>
  
  <p>4) View: I am planning to use JSTL as a presentation layer by converting existing JSP's  as i have worked on it a bit and are straight(less abstraction). My Question: Any other technology other than JSTL like JSF and your suggestions for JSTL. </p>
  
  <p>Thanks for your time.</p>