Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework [Paperback]

Rod Johnson (Author), Juergen Hoeller (Author), Alef Arendsen (Author), Thomas Risberg (Author), Colin Sampaleanu (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0764574833 | ISBN-13: 978-0764574832 | Publication Date: July 8, 2005 | Edition: 1

The Spring Framework is a major open source application development framework that makes Java/J2EE(TM) development easier and more productive. This book shows you not only what Spring can do but why, explaining its functionality and motivation to help you use all parts of the framework to develop successful applications.

You will be guided through all the Spring features and see how they form a coherent whole. In turn, this will help you understand the rationale for Spring's approach, when to use Spring, and how to follow best practices. All this is illustrated with a complete sample application. When you finish the book, you will be well equipped to use Spring effectively in everything from simple Web applications to complex enterprise applications.

What you will learn from this book
* The core Inversion of Control container and the concept of Dependency Injection
* Spring's Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) framework and why AOP is important in J2EE development
* How to use Spring's programmatic and declarative transaction management services effectively
* Ways to access data using Spring's JDBC functionality, iBATIS SQL Maps, Hibernate, and other O/R mapping frameworks
* Spring services for accessing and implementing EJBs
* Spring's remoting framework

Who this book is for

This book is for Java/J2EE architects and developers who want to gain a deeper knowledge of the Spring Framework and use it effectively.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

The Spring Framework is a major open source application development framework that makes Java/J2EE™ development easier and more productive. This book shows you not only what Spring can do but why, explaining its functionality and motivation to help you use all parts of the framework to develop successful applications.

You will be guided through all the Spring features and see how they form a coherent whole. In turn, this will help you understand the rationale for Spring's approach, when to use Spring, and how to follow best practices. All this is illustrated with a complete sample application. When you finish the book, you will be well equipped to use Spring effectively in everything from simple Web applications to complex enterprise applications.

What you will learn from this book

• The core Inversion of Control container and the concept of Dependency Injection
• Spring's Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) framework and why AOP is important in J2EE development
• How to use Spring's programmatic and declarative transaction management services effectively
• Ways to access data using Spring's JDBC functionality, iBATIS SQL Maps, Hibernate, and other O/R mapping frameworks
• Spring services for accessing and implementing EJBs
• Spring's remoting framework

Who this book is for

This book is for Java/J2EE architects and developers who want to gain a deeper knowledge of the Spring Framework and use it effectively.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

About the Author

Rod Johnson is the founder of the Spring Framework and a well-known expert on Java and J2EE.
Rod holds a Ph.D. from Sydney University. Originally from a C/C++ background, he has been involved with Java and J2EE since their releases as a developer, architect, and consultant.
He is the author of two of the most popular and influential books on J2EE: Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development (Wrox, 2002), and J2EE without EJB (Wrox, 2004, with Juergen Hoeller). Both have played a major role in the rise of “agile” J2EE, and the move away from overly complex traditional J2EE architecture.
Rod is co-lead of the Spring Framework. He is a popular conference speaker and regularly appears at leading Java events in the US, Europe, and Asia. He serves in the Java Community Process (JCP) on the expert groups of several JSRs.
He also has wide consulting experience in banking and finance, insurance, software, and media. He is CEO of Interface21 (www.interface21.com), a consultancy devoted to providing expert J2EE and Spring Framework services.
He is actively involved with client projects as well as Spring development.

Juergen Hoeller is co-founder of Interface21, the company providing commercial Spring services from the source. He is a key driver of Spring development and has been release manager since Spring’s inception. His special interests and responsibilities in the project cover a wide variety of topics, from the core container to transaction management, data access, and lightweight remoting.
Juergen has a Master’s degree in computer science from the University of Linz, specializing in Java, OO modeling, and software engineering. He is co-author of Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB (Wiley, 2004) and regularly presents at conferences and other events. He is also active in many community forums, including TheServerSide.

Alef Arendsen studied computer sciences at the University of Utrecht. Later, also in Utrecht, Alef started his first company. After this turned out to be too little a challenge, Alef went to work for SmartHaven, an Amsterdam-based VCfunded company providing J2EE components for knowledge management applications. He was responsible for streamlining the development process and designing parts of the component infrastructure. In early 2002, together with Joost van de Wijgerd, Alef founded JTeam, a software company providing J2EE development services. Alef is a core Spring committer and, while remaining involved with JTeam, he is now a consultant for Interface21. He is a frequent speaker at public conferences. Alef can be reached by email at [e-mail]. You can also read his blog at http://blog.arendsen.net.

Thomas Risberg is a database developer working for TargetrRx, a pharmaceutical market research company located in Horsham, Pennsylvania. He has many years of experience working with both large and small organizations on various database-related projects ranging from simple data entry programs to large data warehousing implementations. Thomas is a reformed COBOL programmer who came to Java via Xbase, Visual Basic, and PL/SQL. He served as an Oracle DBA for a couple of years but decided that software development was really where his heart was. Thomas has a B.A. degree in information processing from the University of Stockhom, Sweden. He is a certified Oracle Professional DBA and a Sun Certified Java Programmer and J2EE Architect.
Thomas joined the Spring Framework development team in early 2003 and is mostly involved in evolving the JDBC layer. His non-computer–related interests are soccer, photography, and travel.

Colin Sampaleanu has had a long and varied career spanning almost two decades—after a childhood spent tinkering with computers and software—including experience developing for and managing his own retail software company, other years in the C++ shrinkwrap and enterprise software space, experience with Java since the early days of the language, and a complete focus on enterprise Java since the late nineties.
Colin is a currently a principal partner at Interface21, which specializes in Spring training, consulting, and support. Prior to joining Interface21, Colin was Chief Architect at a software incubator / VC.
As a core Spring developer and Interface21 principal, Colin spends much of his time talking and writing about the benefits of Spring, and promoting agile software development architectures and methodologies in general.

Product Details

• Paperback: 672 pages
• Publisher: Wrox; 1 edition (July 8, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764574833
• ISBN-13: 978-0764574832
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #272,078 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Fluff, there are better choices, October 6, 2005

By 

Chappy (Denver, CO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework (Paperback)

This book is almost identical to the Spring developer's guide available on the web site. They follow the same chapters and format, and provide little new information, maybe some code. But once you start to get into Spring and use it, you'll want a reference that is more in depth. With this book, you'll find yourself struggling to find the details by browsing google and javadocs all day. Pro Spring is a better book that gives you more insight into how Spring works. My background is providing a services interface layer for a J2EE portal. I'm not developing the MVC so I didn't pay attention to those parts of the book.

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Nothing extraordinary. Decent coverage of basic and advanced concepts alike., July 9, 2006

By 

Ganeshji Marwaha (India) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework (Paperback)

There are quite a few books on spring framework in the wild and since I have read every one of them, I take the privilege to say that this book is not the best among them.

If you are a beginner; please stay away from this book. If you already know spring and want to add to your knowledge, then read on.

I was eagerly awaiting this book for 2 reasons.
1. One of the co-authors is Rod Johnson (creator of spring)
2. Almost none of the spring books in the market covered Spring MVC well

I have read Rod's previous books (J2EE Design and Development && J2EE Development without EJB). Both of them are classics, and deservedly so. Naturally, I expected the same quality from this book as well. Sadly, my expectation was wrong, and this book comes nowhere close to the quality of his previous works. This might be partly because, he wrote only a couple of chapters.

Secondly, I anticipated some coverage of the forthcoming spring 2.0 release. I imagine, this is a reasonable expectation because, this book came very late to the market, and it would make sense to cover a few more new features. Sadly, nothing more than "spring 1.2" is covered.

Thirdly, though this book's TOC contains some impressive topics not covered by other books, (like Acegi security), the coverage is pretty shallow and not well written either. This is a very poor combination to learn an advanced concept. So, the chapter is there, just making the TOC impressive. I didn't gain much penetration into "Acegi Security" from that chapter.

Is the coverage of basics good? I don't think so. But, this is the only part; they have at least attempted some comprehensiveness.

As usual, Spring MVC receives second class treatment although 3 full chapters are dedicated to cover it. This is the same with almost all spring books in the market. So, if you want to understand the full power of Spring MVC then, I would recommend, full-fledged books like "Expert Spring MVC and Web flow".

Another annoying fact is that, the authors refer back to Rod's other 2 books for many important concepts, leaving the reader hanging in mid air, especially, if you are a beginner.

Last, but not the least, When I was reading a few advanced concepts from this book, I felt a lot like reading the spring online documentation. So, I went to the documentation to check if my intuition is correct. It comes as no surprise that, there was a good deal of copy-paste. This may not be a very bad thing, because today's technology books are merely a consolidation of online documentation with interesting examples, practical use-cases and some of the author's experience combined. So, this fact is acceptable, but, still, I wanted to point this out.

Overall, from my point of view, I didn't find any real value from this book. So, beginners stay away, but experienced may use it as a reference.

34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Definitive Guide for Spring 1.2, July 14, 2005

By 

Edmon Begoli (Knoxville, TN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework (Paperback)

If you are looking for a definitive reference manual, and a guide on Spring 1.2 this book is it. Look no further.
This book has significant depth, and it will teach you, clarify or answer almost any question on any area of the current Spring relase (1.2).

It has a very thorough coverage of Spring MVC, Acegi, AOP, Persistance, Spring JDBC. It will make those still unconvinced about the Spring much more comfortable about using it.

Why I then gave it 4 and not 5 stars.
I would expect that authors of this book who happen to be an authors of the framework itself would go an extra mile and describe some major new features that are available but awaiting Spring 1.3 (like Spring WebFlow) release; I would expect them to be less skimpy on some major "hot off the press" features that are part of the Spring 1.2.2 such as transactional annotations.
(Yes, they are brand new, but these guys knew they were coming. They implemented them.)

That would completely differentiate this otherwise excellent book from the other books on the same subject.
Hard core Spring users who lived by so far by the reference manual available on the Spring's web site, and by support forums
will not find much new in this book.

The other book on this subject that I own and recommend is "Spring in Action".