Wow! As I write this, it’s been almost seven years since Spring 1.0 was released and Ryan Breidenbach and I started work on the first edition of Spring in Action. Back then, who would have guessed that Spring would transform Java development as much as it has?
In that first edition, Ryan and I tried to cover every corner of the Spring Frame- work. For the most part, we were successful. Back then the entire Spring story could easily be told in 11 chapters with dependency injection, AOP, persistence, transactions, Spring MVC, and Acegi Security as the main characters. Of course, back then that story had to be told with a lot of XML. (Does anybody remember what it was like declaring transactions with TransactionProxyFactoryBean?)
By the time I got around to writing the second edition, Spring had grown quite a bit. Again, I tried to squeeze everything I could into a single book. I found out it wasn’t possible. Spring had expanded well beyond what could be discussed in a 700- to 800-page book. In fact, entire, completely written chapters were cut out of the second edition because there wasn’t room.
More than three years and two major versions of Spring have passed since the sec- ond edition was printed. Spring covers more ground than ever before and it would take several volumes to comprehensively cover the entire Spring portfolio. It’s not possible to cram everything there is to know about Spring into a single book.
So I’m not going to even try.
Often books get thicker with each successive edition. But you’ve probably noticed by now that this third edition of Spring in Action has fewer pages than the second edi- tion. That’s possible for a couple of reasons.