| This book is written for Java developers familiar with web frameworks. Its main purpose is for Java developers to learn Spring and evaluate it against other frameworks. One of my hopes is to compare Spring to other web frameworks, or at least show how it can be integrated with other frameworks (i.e. Struts, WebWork, maybe even Tapestry down the road). This book will contain a usable sample application that includes Spring code to wire DAOs and Services together. The book does have a bit of a Struts perspective to it as I have been a Struts developer
for almost three years and Struts is the most popular web framework today. It is only natural that I use my experience in my writing.
Rod Johnson is the ingenious inventor of Spring. It started from infrastructure code in his book, Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development, in late 2002. I highly recommend this book. In it, Rod explains his experiences with J2EE and how Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) are often overkill for projects. He believes a lightweight, JavaBeans-based framework can suite most developers’ needs. The framework described eventually became known as The Spring Framework when it was open-sourced on SourceForge in February 2003. At this point, Rod was joined by Juergen Hoeller as Lead Developer and right-hand man of Spring. Rod and Juergen have added many other developers over the last several months. At the time of this writing, sixteen developers are on Spring’s committee list. Rod and Juergen have recently written a book titled Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB that describes how Spring solves many of the problems with J2EE.
The architectural foundations of Spring have been developed by Rod since early 2000 (before Struts or any other frameworks I know of). These foundations were built from Rod’s experiences building infrastructure on a number of successful commercial projects. Spring’s foundation is constantly being enhanced and re-enforced by hundreds (possibly thousands) of developers. All are bringing their experience to the table, and you can literally watch Spring become stronger day-by-day. Its community is thriving, its developers are enthusiastic and dedicated and it’s quite possibly the best thing that has ever happened to J2EE |
