Spring is the most popular application development framework for enterprise Java. Millions of developers around the world use Spring Framework to create high performing, easily testable, and reusable code.
Spring framework is an open source Java platform. It was initially written by Rod Johnson and was first released under the Apache 2.0 license in June 2003.
Spring is lightweight when it comes to size and transparency. The basic version of Spring framework is around 2MB.
The core features of the Spring Framework can be used in developing any Java application, but there are extensions for building web applications on top of the Java EE platform. Spring framework targets to make J2EE development easier to use and promotes good programming practices by enabling a POJO-based programming model.
- Spring enables the developers to develop enterprise applications using POJOs (Plain Old Java Object). The benefit of developing the applications using POJO is, that we do not need to have an enterprise container such as an application server but we have the option of using a robust servlet container.
- Spring provides an abstraction layer on existing technologies like servlets, jsps, jdbc, jndi, rmi, jms and Java mail etc., to simplify the develpment process.
- Spring comes with some of the existing technologies like ORM framework, logging framework, J2EE and JDK Timers etc, Hence we don’t need to integrate explicitly those technologies.
- Spring WEB framework has a well-designed web MVC framework, which provides a great alternate to lagacy web framework.
- Spring can eliminate the creation of the singleton and factory classes.
- Spring provides a consistent transaction management interface that can scale down to a local transaction and scale up to global transactions (using JTA).
- Spring framework includes support for managing business objects and exposing their services to the presentation tier components, so that the web and desktop applications can access the same objects.
- Spring framework has taken the best practice that have been proven over the years in several applications and formalized as design patterns.
- Spring application can be used for the development of different kind of applications, like standalone applications, standalone GUI applications, Web applications and applets as well.
- Spring supports both xml and anotation configurations.
- Spring Framework allows to develop standalone, desktop, 2 tire – n-tire architecture and distributed applications.
- Spring gives built in middleware services like Connection pooling, Transaction management and etc.,
- Spring provides a light weight container which can be activaed without using webserver or application server.
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Spring enables developers to develop enterprise-class applications using POJOs. The benefit of using only POJOs is that you do not need an EJB container product such as an application server but you have the option of using only a robust servlet container such as Tomcat or some commercial product.
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Spring is organized in a modular fashion. Even though the number of packages and classes are substantial, you have to worry only about the ones you need and ignore the rest.
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Spring does not reinvent the wheel, instead it truly makes use of some of the existing technologies like several ORM frameworks, logging frameworks, JEE, Quartz and JDK timers, and other view technologies.
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Testing an application written with Spring is simple because environment-dependent code is moved into this framework. Furthermore, by using JavaBeanstyle POJOs, it becomes easier to use dependency injection for injecting test data.
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Spring's web framework is a well-designed web MVC framework, which provides a great alternative to web frameworks such as Struts or other over-engineered or less popular web frameworks.
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Spring provides a convenient API to translate technology-specific exceptions (thrown by JDBC, Hibernate, or JDO, for example) into consistent, unchecked exceptions.
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Lightweight IoC containers tend to be lightweight, especially when compared to EJB containers, for example. This is beneficial for developing and deploying applications on computers with limited memory and CPU resources.
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Spring provides a consistent transaction management interface that can scale down to a local transaction (using a single database, for example) and scale up to global transactions (using JTA, for example).