Beginning Spring

INTRODUCTION

THE SPRING FRAMEWORK IS AN OPEN SOURCE ENTERPRISE APPLICATION framework licensed under Apache License version 2.0, which provides an extensive toolset for building applications that meet the enterprise demands. The idea itself came about because doing development with J2EE (the former version of Java Enterprise Edition) introduced a good deal of complexity in the enterprise world. Creating and deploying beans with Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) was a burden because, to create one bean, you had to create home and component interfaces along with the bean definition. Because the concept of dependency injection was also missing in the EJB world at those times, the lookup approach was the only way to find objects or resources.

The first version of the Spring Framework was based on the code published within Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development without EJB (Wrox, 2004) by Rod Johnson and Jürgen Höller. The main idea for the book was to reduce this complexity of enterprise application development with EJBs that was introduced to the EE world with J2EE. The first version of Spring was released in 2002, and milestone releases followed in 2004 and 2005. Version 1.0 brought the lightweight application framework along with features including JDBC abstraction, object relational mapping tools support, transaction management, scheduling and mail abstraction implementations, and the Model View Controller (MVC) web framework.

The 2.0 and 3.0 releases introduced important features ...