Spring is an open development framework for enterprise java. It entertain immense popularity among java developers due to its down-to-earth features. It was developed by Rod Johnson who described Spring framework in his book "Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development" in 2002. Spring was created to simplify the complexities of enterprise application development. It provides simplicity, loose coupling and testability features to any java application.
Key Strategies of Spring
Followings are four main key strategies for simplifying the Java Development -
1. Lightweight development with POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects)
2. Loose coupling via dependency injection
3. Declarative programming through aspects
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4. Code Reduction through aspects and templates
Definition : Spring is a lightweight dependency injection and aspect-oriented container and framework.
Let us understand it by knowing each term mentioned in the definition.
Lightweight :
Spring is lightweight as per the size and transparency is concern. The basic version of Spring is about 2.5 MB.
Dependency Injection (DI) :
Spring promotes loose coupling through dependency injection. Under Dependency injection, object does not look for dependencies, container provides dependencies to the object without being asked.
Aspect-oriented :
It separates application business logic from system services (like logging, auditing, transaction management)
Container :
Spring is a container because it provides the
lifecycle management to application objects and configure them.
Framework :
Spring provides basic infrastructure services to configure and compose applications
Versions of Spring Released :
* The First Version 1.0 was released in 2004.
* Version 2.0 was released in 2006.
* Version 2.5 in 2007
* Version 3.0 in 2009
* Version 3.1 in 2011
* Version 3.2.2 ( current version ) in 2013
* Version 4.0 will be released in the end of 2013.
Modules in Spring Framework :
Following are the modules, which constitute architecture of Spring Framework.
* Core Container contains Core , Beans, Context and Expression Language Module.
* Data Integration Access contains JDBC, ORM, OXM, Transactions and JMS modules.
* Web contains Web, Servlet, Portlet and Struts modules.
* Apart from above Spring framework contains AOP, Aspects, Instrumentations and Test modules.
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