Spring Framework Overview & Tools

Topics 

• What is Spring framework? 
• Why Spring framework? 
• Spring framework architecture 
• Usage scenario 
• Tools (we are going to use in this course)

What is Spring Framework?

• Light-weight yet comprehensive framework for building various types of Java applications 
  • Web applications 
  • Enterprise applications 
  • Standalone applications 
  • Batch application 
  • Integration application 
  • Mobile application

Things you can build with Spring

Key Features - DI 

• Bean wiring is done through the Dependency Injection (DI) 
  • This aims to eliminate manual wiring of beans 
• A core bean factory, which is usable globally 
  • Spring MVC uses it internally

Key Features - Persistence

• Comprehensive RDBMS support 
  • Generic abstraction layer for database transaction management 
  • Higher abstraction over JDBC 
  • Integration with persistence frameworks such as Hibernate, JPA 
• NoSQL support 
  • MongoDB

Key Features - Web-Tier

• Spring MVC web application framework 
  • Built on core Spring functionality 
  • Supports many technologies for generating views, including Thymeleaf, Velocity, Freemarker, and JSP, etc 
• Spring Web Flow 
  • Navigation logic is externalized 
• REST support
  • Simple to create RESTful service 
• Default over configuration
  • Everything is configurable and customizable

Key Features - AOP

• Extensive aspect-oriented programming (AOP) framework for providing services such as transaction management, security support 
• As with DI, this aims to improve the modularity of systems created using the framework

Key Features - Test

• Supports Unit testing and Integration testing of Spring components 
• Supports both JUnit and TestNG 
• Provides consistent loading of Spring ApplicationContexts and caching of those contexts 
• Provides mock objects that you can use to test your code in isolation

Why Use Spring Framework?

• Wiring components (Beans) through Dependency Injection (DI) 
  • Promotes de-coupling among the parts that make up an application 
• Design to Java interfaces 
  • Insulates a user of a functionality from implementation details 
• Test-Driven Development (TDD)
  • POJO classes can be tested without being tied up with the framework
• Declarative programming through AOP
  • Transaction and security can be easily and declaratively configured 
• Simplify use of popular technologies 
  • Abstractions insulate application from specifics, eliminate redundant code 
  • Underlying technology specifics still accessible 
  • Handle common error conditions
• Conversion of checked exceptions to unchecked 
  • (Or is this a reason not to use it?) 
• Not an all-or-nothing solution 
  • Extremely modular and flexible 
• Well designed 
  • Easy to extend 
  • Many reusable classes
• Integration with other technologies 
  • JPA, Hibernate, JDBC (for data access) 
  • Thymeleaf, Velocity, etc. (for presentation) 
  • JSF, Wicket, Struts, etc (For web) 
  • AngularJS, jQuery, JavaScript (for front-end UI) 
  • ActiveMQ, AMQP (for messaging)

Spring Framework Architecture

Usage Scenarios

You can use Spring in all sorts of scenarios, from applets up to fully-fledged enterprise applications using Spring's transaction management functionality and web framework integration

Typical Full-fledged Spring Web Application

SpringSource Tool Suite (STS)

• Eclipse-powered development environment for building Spring-powered enterprise applications 
  • Supports Java, Spring, Groovy and Grails 
• Comes with developer edition of vFabric tc Server 
  • Pivotal tc Server is Tomcat that is optimized for Spring 
  • You can use Tomcat and other servers with STS

Lab: Exercise1: Download & Install STS Exercise 2: Build and run a simple SpringMVC Application using STS 4931_spring_sts.zip

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