Spring mania

Lately there’s been a lot of debate around the Spring framework
 . Spring has made it clear which direction lightweight J2EE 
 containers should take.

Spring’s authors try to avoid reinventing the wheel or 
 replacing existing technologies. Their aim is to help developers 
 use them.

Need a persistence layer? Spring supports object-relational frameworks
 such as Hibernate and iBatis, as well as JDO itself. Need a DAO layer? Spring has classes
 to make that easier. Need transaction handling, whether programmatic or 
 declarative, with EJB-style transaction propagation? Spring makes it easy.

I could go on with features such as support for aspect-oriented programming (AOP),
 remoting (exposing application logic as web services), a smart JDBC data layer, MVC,
 and plenty more.

Spring takes a non-invasive approach and keeps your code from getting tangled up in its API.
 To do that, Spring uses inversion of control (see Dagblog, 17 May 2004, J2EE patterns for inversion of control and dependency injection) 
 throughout its design. You can of course use the benefits of IoC in your own applications too.

Back to this week’s Spring articles and discussions. Here’s Spring
 in the Pet Store example.

• (ONJava) Bruce A. Tate, Justin Gehtland Spring in Action I
• (ONJava) Bruce A. Tate, Justin Gehtland Spring in Action II

An interview with Spring co-creator Rod Johnson, covering Spring,
 AOP, lightweight containers and much more.