Spring: A Developer's Notebook [Paperback]

Bruce A. Tate (Author), Justin Gehtland (Author)

Book Description

Series: Developer's Notebook | Publication Date: April 12, 2005

Since development first began on Spring in 2003, there's been a constant buzz about it in Java development publications and corporate IT departments. The reason is clear: Spring is a lightweight Java framework in a world of complex heavyweight architectures that take forever to implement. Spring is like a breath of fresh air to overworked developers.

In Spring, you can make an object secure, remote, or transactional, with a couple of lines of configuration instead of embedded code. The resulting application is simple and clean. In Spring, you can work less and go home early, because you can strip away a whole lot of the redundant code that you tend to see in most J2EE applications. You won't be nearly as burdened with meaningless detail. In Spring, you can change your mind without the consequences bleeding through your entire application. You'll adapt much more quickly than you ever could before.

Spring: A Developer's Notebook offers a quick dive into the new Spring framework, designed to let you get hands-on as quickly as you like. If you don't want to bother with a lot of theory, this book is definitely for you. You'll work through one example after another. Along the way, you'll discover the energy and promise of the Spring framework.

This practical guide features ten code-intensive labs that'll rapidly get you up to speed. You'll learn how to do the following, and more:

• install the Spring Framework
• set up the development environment
• use Spring with other open source Java tools such as Tomcat, Struts, and Hibernate
• master AOP and transactions
• utilize ORM solutions

As with all titles in the Developer's Notebook series, this no-nonsense book skips all the boring prose and cuts right to the chase. It's an approach that forces you to get your hands dirty by working through one instructional example after another-examples that speak to you instead of at you.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Bruce A. Tate is a kayaker, mountain biker, and father of two. In his spare time, he is an independent consultant in Austin, Texas. In 2001, he founded J2Life, LLC, a consulting firm that specializes in Java persistence frameworks and lightweight development methods. His customers have included FedEx, Great West Life, TheServerSide, and BEA. He speaks at conferences and Java user's groups around the nation. Before striking out on his own, Bruce spent 13 years at IBM working on database technologies, object-oriented infrastructure, and Java. He was recruited away from IBM to help start the client services practice in an Austin startup called Pervado Systems. He later served a brief stint as CTO of IronGrid, which built nimble Java performance tools. Bruce is the author of four books, including the bestselling Bitter Java, and the recently released Better, Faster, Lighter Java, from O'Reilly. First rule of kayak: When in doubt, paddle like Hell.

Working as a professional programmer, instructor, speaker and pundit since 1992, Justin Gehtland has developed real-world applications using VB, COM, .NET, Java, Perl and a slew of obscure technologies since relegated to the trash heap of technical history. His focus has historically been on "connected" applications, which of course has led him down the COM+, ASP/ASP.NET and JSP roads.

Justin is the co-author of Effective Visual Basic (Addison Wesley, 2001) and Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET (Addison Wesley, 2003). He is currently the regular Agility columnist on The Server Side .NET, and works as a consultant through his company Relevance, LLC in addition to teaching for DevelopMentor.

Product Details

• Paperback: 216 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (April 12, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596009100
• ISBN-13: 978-0596009106
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,410,759 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

81 of 83 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars I agree with most of you..., July 26, 2005

By 

Bruce A. Tate "Author of Better, Faster, Ligh... (Austin, Tx) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Spring: A Developer's Notebook (Paperback)

I'm the author of this book, and I'm writing myself a one star review because you're all right, and you deserve to know what I'm doing about it. We pushed out a book before it was ready, and let way too many errors go undiscovered. My co-author, Justin Gehtland's blog chronicles the experience well. Let me tell you what we're doing so it doesn't happen again.

* We've just worked on a reprinting of this book with the great folks at O'Reilly.

* We've invested more time in the reprinting than we invested in pushing the book out to production the first time.

* O'Reilly has paid for independent reviewers to make sure that we have the code and content rock solid.

* O'Reilly has eaten the remaining books in the original printing, and will use only the reprint.

* I've refrained from promoting the book in public, until the reprinting was under way. I made no announcement in the usual places, even my blog.

My appologies to all readers, and O'Reilly customers. I let you down. There's no other way to put it. This book's quality sucked. We were overconfident after the Jolt award, and pushed it out before it was ready. If you do happen to order it, make sure that you get the reprint.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Updated Edition?, December 21, 2005

By 

Tim Hughes "some guy" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Spring: A Developer's Notebook (Paperback)

After purchasing the disaster that was the original edition, I purchased the updated version based on two things: (1) O'Reilly's usual quality products and (2) the review on this site by the author Bruce Tate discussing the changes made to the updated edition.

Well, gee... this time they made it all the way to Example 1-10 before there was an error. Granted, it's a small, easy one ("RentABikeApp-context.xml" instead of "RentABike-context.xml"), but it's still an unforgivable error given the train-wreck of the first printing.

By Example 1-12 (the ant build.xml) there are calls to directories which are not defined in the example, and other code which (depending upon how your local environment is set up) will simply not work at all. This particular situation could have been fixed by (a) providing explicit instructions on Spring framework setup so that the examples will automagically work for all those using the book and (b) some simple proofreading of the code.

Nothing I have mentioned constitutes insurmountable problems for someone familiar with J2EE development and ant, but it is simply rude and terribly infuriating that the simplest examples in the "updated" version require debugging of the code printed in the book.

What led to the approval of this new version which is still fraught with issues? Was it laziness? Ineptitude? At this point I don't care. If they can't even get me through chapter one without the requirement that I fix their code, I give up. I wish I could give this zero stars, particularly after they KNEW of the problems with the initial printing.

Perhaps they can get it right by version 5 or 7... until then, find another Spring book.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Further comments on the reprint, August 19, 2005

By 

Daniel Kirkdorffer (United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Spring: A Developer's Notebook (Paperback)

I ordered this book directly from the publisher back in early June and discovered to my surprise that it was not in stock. Yet I had seen it in a number of brick and mortar stores in my area, so I contacted them and was told that bookstores were being told to pull the book from the shelves because the book had so many problems it was being reprinted.

However, a few weeks later I was still seeing the book on bookshelves at stores and when I asked about that the store folks indicated they had not received a recall notice. Who to believe?

I finally received my copy today in the mail. The only thing that indicates this is a different copy than the original printing is an "Updated" label in the top right hand corner of the cover page. Otherwise the ISBN number is the same, and it still says "April 2005, First Edition" in the printing history section. There is no indicator in the Preface section that the book was subject to a reprinting, which I think would have been appropriate, as well as an update in the printing history - after all, isn't that the point of a printing history section?

So look for "Updated" on the cover, and only buy that version!