Description:

The Spring project provides a layered Java/J2EE application framework based on code published in Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development by Rod Johnson (Wrox, 2002). The Spring Framework includes:

• A complete lightweight container, providing centralized, automated, and transparent configuration and wiring of your application objects.

• A common abstraction layer for transaction management, allowing for pluggable transaction managers, and making it easy to demarcate transactions without dealing with low-level issues. In contrast to plain JTA or EJB CMT, Spring's transaction support is not tied to any J2EE environment.

• A JDBC abstraction layer that simplifies error handling and greatly reduces the amount of code you need to write.

• Integration with Toplink, Hibernate, JDO, and iBATIS SQL Maps.

• First-class Hibernate support with lots of IoC convenience features, addressing many typical Hibernate integration issues.

• Fully integrated AOP functionality meaning you can AOP-enable any object managed by Spring. For example, you can have declarative transaction management without EJB, even without JTA, if you're using a single database in Tomcat or another web container without JTA support.

• A flexible MVC web application framework. This framework is highly configurable via strategy interfaces, and accommodates multiple view technologies like JSP, Velocity, Tiles, iText, and POI.

• The ability to combine a Spring middle tier with any other web MVC framework, like Struts, WebWork, or Tapestry.

• A layered architecture so that each piece of functionality builds on lower levels. So you can use the JavaBeans configuration management without using the MVC framework or AOP support. But if you use the MVC framework, because it builds on the configuration framework, you can apply knowledge about configuration management to the MVC framework immediately.

Usage Notes:

Use Spring's functionality in any J2EE server, and most of it also in non-managed environments. A central focus of Spring is to allow for reusable business and data access objects that are not tied to specific J2EE services. Such objects can be reused across J2EE environments (web or EJB), standalone applications, test environments and the like without any hassle.