Song of The Day: Spring 2001 - Artist: Lila
Recently, I rewrote a significant part of a Tomcat/JSP/JDBC application using the Spring Framework 2.x and Hibernate 3.x. Although Hibernate has its niceties and nuances, the Spring Framework integration alone reduced the code complexity, made the code more readable and maintainable, and reinforced good coding practices.
Those in the Java space likely already know the advantages of an MVC framework, possibly having used Struts or Spring previously, but today I thought I’d write a few thoughts about it.
So What is Spring
Spring is a component framework introduced by Rod Johnson back in 2002. The latest version has a plethora of features, but probably one of the best known, and best publicized for some time now, is the IOC (inversion of control) implementation, which may be more correctly be termed with certain concepts as dependency injection (DI). Another facet, considered positive by most I think, is that Spring emphasizes POJO-based development, which may keep architectures simpler compared to EJB-based frameworks. Moreover, the brief example below takes advantage of Spring’s Web MVC Framework as well, which can dramatically reduce effort on forms.