The Spring IDE is a set of Eclipse plugins that aid the development of Spring-based applications. The latest Spring IDE milestone release adds support for Spring Webflow, a new controller framework and a recent member of the Spring project:

Spring Webflow is a next generation Java web application controller framework that allows developers to model user actions as high-level modules called flows. The framework delivers improved productivity and testability while providing a strong solution to enforcing navigation rules and managing application state.

A key aspect of Spring Webflow is the ability to model a Web application as a series of steps in a workflow:

A flow defines a user dialog that responds to user events to drive the execution of application code to complete a business goal...

Flow ... are defined declaratively using a rich domain-specific language (DSL). The XML (XSD) form of this language is the most popular with users. Once defined, a flow is testable in isolation, may be embedded within other flows as a subflow, and may be deployed for execution across multiple environments including Java EE Servlet and Portlet (JSR 168) without change.

The latest milestone of the Spring IDE, M3, released this week, provides a graphical editor for Spring Webflow XML files. The integration provides a graphical workflow designer that visually represents controllers and their interactions:

What do you think of Spring Webflow's approach of using a domain-specific language to define controller interactions?