Harnessing Hibernate

Chapter 13. Put a Spring in your Step: Hibernate with Spring

What Is Spring?

If you’ve been paying attention to Java programming over the last few years, you’ve probably heard of the Spring Framework. The Spring Framework is an Inversion of Control (IoC) container with a number of additional integrated features and modules. To some it is just an IoC container; to others it is an entire platform for application development. (We will expand on what is meant in the next section.)

Created by Rod Johnson in 2000, Spring rose to prominence as an alternative to Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs). Between 2000 and 2004, Sun Microsystems released a series of (somewhat terrible) specifications for EJBs. EJBs were difficult to understand, develop, and deploy without writing volumes of repetitive code and/or using proprietary tools to shield yourself from the underlying technology. Rod’s seminal text, Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development, published by WROX in 2002, introduced a large number of developers to the idea of replacing EJBs with a simple IoC container and a number of APIs that served to isolate your programs from the rougher edges in Sun’s APIs. Instead of interacting directly with the JDBC, JMS, or the JTA APIs, you could use templates and helpers within Spring. While Sun’s core enterprise APIs are still important to know, a side-effect of using Spring was to lessen the choke-hold Sun had on defining and proposing new libraries and applications. Instead of programming to JDBC