Pro Spring 2.5 (Paperback)

~ Jan Machacek (Author), Jessica Ditt (Author), Aleksa Vukotic (Author), Anirvan Chakraborty (Author)
Key Phrases: session factory, class loader, template method, Spring Web Flow, Hello World, Tue Oct (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The Spring Framework 2.5 release reflects the state of the art in both the Spring Framework and enterprise Java frameworks as a whole. A guidebook to this critical tool is necessary reading for any conscientious Java developer.

— Rob Harrop, author of Pro Spring

The move from so–called heavyweight architectures, such as Enterprise JavaBeans, toward lightweight frameworks, like Spring, has not stopped since Pro Spring was published by Rob Harrop and Jan Machacek in 2005; in fact, it’s picked up pace. The Spring Framework remains the leader in this move and provides a platform on which you can build your own applications and services.

Pro Spring 2.5 covers the new features of Spring 2.5, but moreover, it is focused on the best practices and core standards of contemporary Spring development. As members of the Spring development team at Cake Solutions, the author team brings extensive practical experience gained from working with Spring since version 1.0 and delivering successful systems on top of it.

Learn the approaches that really matter in a professional, enterprise–level environment, so you can apply them to your projects today, safe in the knowledge that they just work.

What You’ll Learn

• Discover how to use Spring’s Inversion of Control (IoC).
• Explore Spring’s excellent aspect–oriented programming (AOP) support, including Spring 2.5’s new @AspectJ feature.
• Find out how to use Spring’s dynamic scripting language features, Spring design patterns, and performance tuning in Spring applications.
• Learn what really works in real–world Spring development.
• Understand Spring’s support for the JDBC framework, Hibernate, the Quartz enterprise scheduler, declarative transaction management, and much more.
• Master Spring’s well–designed MVC framework and add AJAX to your Spring web applications to create flexible, efficient, and manageable applications using the best techniques available.

Who is this book for?

Enterprise Java, J2EE/Java EE developers looking to learn and use the Spring metaframework, the now growing, leading alternative to J2EE/Java EE

About the Apress Pro Series

The Apress Pro series books are practical, professional tutorials to keep you on and moving up the professional ladder.

You have gotten the job, now you need to hone your skills in these tough competitive times. The Apress Pro series expands your skills and expertise in exactly the areas you need. Master the content of a Pro book, and you will always be able to get the job done in a professional development project. Written by experts in their field, Pro series books from Apress give you the hard-won solutions to problems you will face in your professional programming career.

About the Author

Jan Machacek is a chief software architect at Cake Solutions Limited (www.cakesolutions.net), a UK-based software company. He has been an early adopter of Spring at Cake Solutions and has seen the dramatic change the Spring framework has brought to the Java world. As part of his job, Jan designs and oversees the development of majority of Cake's projects. Where appropriate, Jan also applies his interest in declarative programming and artificial intelligence. Throughout his programming career, Jan has designed and implemented large J2EE and .NET systems for the UK government and large private sector bodies. When not programming, Jan enjoys foreign languages; he also enters races and time trials as a member of the Manchester Wheelers' cycling club.

Jessica Ditt is a developer at Cake Solutions Limited. She joined the Cake team in 2005 and has worked on numerous enterprise-level projects, all of which were written using the Spring framework. Jessica has been an early adopter of Spring Webflow at Cake and has become an expert in efficient indexing using Lucene and monitoring deployed systems using JMX. Out of the office, Jessica is a keen volleyball player.

Aleksa Vukotic is senior developer of Cake Solutions Limited. He joined Cake Solutions in June 2004. Since joining Cake, Aleksa has worked on numerous Java projects using the Spring framework for variety of clients. His work includes sophisticated systems for the UK government agencies. As part of his role at Cake, Aleksa helps other members of the team with some of the most complex problems, especially related to data access and MVC. He graduated in computer science and engineering at the School of Electrical Engineering, Belgrade University, Serbia. In his spare time, Aleksa enjoys nights out and computer games.

Anirvan Chakraborty is a developer at Cake Solutions Limited. Since becoming a member of the Cake team in 2006, Anirvan has worked on the more complex projects, including the UK government knowledge management system. Anirvan is a contributor to Lucene integration in the Spring Modules project. Prior to joining Cake, Anirvan completed his master’s degree in Internet software systems at the School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. When not programming, Anirvan enjoys following sports like Cricket and Formula One. He also enjoys reading detective novels and watching movies.

Product Details

• Paperback: 920 pages
• Publisher: Apress (August 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590599217
• ISBN-13: 978-1590599211
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.4 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #90,372 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Poorly Written Spring Book, October 17, 2008

By	George Jiang (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This is the worst Spring book I have read so far. Spring in Action 2nd Edition is much more readable and easier to understand, though that book covers Spring 2.0.

For Spring 2.5, Spring Recipes is far more comprehensive, accurate and up to date than this book. E.g., the @Autowire annotation is only mentioned on page 67. No further explaination. The @Reporsitary annotation is not explained correctly on page 409, giving the wrong impression that dependecies in a class annotated with @Reporsitary are autowired/auto-satisfied.

There are also many information gaps in this book, readers will need to consult SpringSource documentation from time to time when reading this book. E.g., in chapter 17 Spring MVC, there is no description as where to put the context definitions (by default, if the DispactcherServlet is named xyz in web.xml, Spring will look for the associated context definition file at /WEB-INF/xyz-servlet.xml).

Either accidentally or deliberately, the authors seems to shy away from covering Spring's support for non-SE Java EE technologies such as JNDI, JMS, JPA, JSF, EJB2, or EJB3 annotations such as @Resource. The only EE technologies covered are JTA (via Spring transaction management) and Servlet (via Spring MVC).

Even with many critical information missing and many subjects not covered, the book is still bloated to over 900 pages with a lot of confusing and useless text.

I definitely won't buy Pro Spring 3.0 from the same authors.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Waste of money, poorly written, February 9, 2009

By	Mike Z - See all my reviews

I ignored the reviews and decided to purchase this book anyways. What a mistake. The book is poorly written with incomplete examples riddled with errors. I tried downloading the code samples from the web site to follow along and very few worked. Stick to the "..In Action" series. These are written much better, and more reasonably priced. Lessons learned!

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, December 5, 2008

By	B. Tong "zztong" (Ohio) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I found this book to be rather confusing. The relevant parts for my needs seem to be as inadequately expressed as the same material on the Spring web site. I was hoping to find a book that provided clarity instead of more confusion. The best use of this book would be as a source of different perspectives on specific topics you're reading about in another book.