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As a developer, you should always be seeking the best design for your application, regardless of the implementation you choose. Sometimes the complexity of EJB is warranted because of the requirements of the application. Often, this is not the case. Many applications require few, if any, of the services provided by EJB yet are still implemented using this technology for technology’s sake. If an application does not require distribution or declarative transaction support, it is unlikely that EJB is the best technology candidate. Yet many Java developers feel compelled to use EJB for every Java enterprise application.
The idea behind Spring is that you can keep your code as simple as it needs to be. If what you want are some plain-vanilla Java objects to perform some services supported by transparent transactions, you’ve got it. And you don’t need an EJB container, and you don’t have to implement special interfaces. You just have to write your code.
If you are relying on EJBs to provide your application services, your components do not just depend on the EJB business interface. They are also responsible for retrieving these EJB objects from a directory, which entails a Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) lookup and communicating with the bean’s EJBHome interface. This is not creating a decoupled application. This is tightly coupling your application to a specific implementation, namely EJB.
With Spring, your beans depend on collaborators through interfaces. Since there are no implementation-specific dependencies, Spring applications are very decoupled, testable, and easier to maintain. And because the Spring container is responsible for resolving the dependencies, the active service lookup that is involved in EJB is now out of the picture and the cost of programming to interfaces is minimized. All you need to do is create classes that communicate with each other through interfaces, and Spring takes care of the rest.
Testing J2EE applications can be difficult. If you are testing EJBs within a container, you have to start up a container to execute even the most trivial of test cases. Since starting and stopping a container is expensive, developers may be tempted to skip testing all of their components. Avoiding tests because of the rigidness of a framework is not a good excuse.
Because you develop Spring applications with JavaBeans, testing is cheap. There is no J2EE container to be started since you will be testing a POJO. And since Spring makes coding to interfaces easy, your objects will be loosely coupled, making testing even easier. A thorough battery of tests should be present in all of your applications; Spring will help you accomplish this.
Spring is an open-source framework, created by Rod Johnson and described in his book Expert One-on-One: J2EE Design and Development.1 It was created to address the complexity of enterprise application development. Spring makes it possible to use plain-vanilla JavaBeans to achieve things that were previously only possible with EJBs. However, Spring’s usefulness isn’t limited to server-side development. Any Java application can benefit from Spring in terms of simplicity, testability, and loose coupling.
NOTE To avoid ambiguity, we’ll use the term “EJB” when referring to Enterprise JavaBeans. When referring to the original JavaBean, we’ll call it “JavaBean,” or “bean” for short. Some other terms we may throw around are “POJO” (which stands for “plain old Java object”) or “POJI” (which means “plain old Java interface”).
Put simply, Spring is a lightweight inversion of control and aspect-oriented container framework. Okay, that’s not so simple a description. But it does summarize what Spring does. To make more sense of Spring, let’s break this description down:
Lightweight - Spring is lightweight in terms of both size and overhead. The entire Spring framework can be distributed in a single JAR file that weighs in at just over 1 MB. And the processing overhead required by Spring is negligible. What's more, Spring is nonintrusive: objects in a Spring-enabled application typically have no dependencies on Springspecific classes.
Inversion of control - Spring promotes loose coupling through a technique known as inversion of control (IoC). When IoC is applied, objects are passively given their dependencies instead of creating or looking for dependent objects for themselves. You can think of IoC as JNDI in reverse - instead of an object looking up dependencies from a container, the container gives the dependencies to the object at instantiation without waiting to be asked.
Aspect-oriented - Spring comes with rich support for aspect-oriented programming that enables cohesive development by separating application business logic from system services (such as auditing and transaction management). Application objects do what they're supposed to do - perform business logic - and nothing more. They are not responsible for (or even aware of) other system concerns, such as logging or transactional support.
Container - Spring is a container in the sense that it contains and manages the life cycle and configuration of application objects. You can configure how your each of your beans should be created - either create one single instance of your bean or produce a new instance every time one is needed based on a configurable prototype - and how they should be associated with each other. Spring should not, however, be confused with traditionally heavyweight EJB containers, which are often large and cumbersome to work with.
Framework - Spring makes it possible to configure and compose complex applications from simpler components. In Spring, application objects are composed declaratively, typically in an XML file. Spring also provides much infrastructure functionality (transaction management, persistence framework integration, etc.), leaving the development of application logic to you.
All of these attributes of Spring enable you to write code that is cleaner, more manageable, and easier to test. They also set the stage for a variety of subframeworks within the greater Spring framework.
The Spring framework is made up of seven well-defined modules (figure 1.1). When taken as a whole, these modules give you everything you need to develop enterprise-ready applications. But you do not have to base your application fully on the Spring framework. You are free to pick and choose the modules that suit your application and ignore the rest.
As you can see, all of Spring’s modules are built on top of the core container. The container defines how beans are created, configured, and managed—more of the nuts-and-bolts of Spring. You will implicitly use these classes when you configure your application. But as a developer, you will most likely be interested in the other modules that leverage the services provided by the container. These modules will provide the frameworks with which you will build your application’s services, such as AOP and persistence.
Figure 1.1 The Spring framework is composed of several well-defined modules.
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Created: March 27, 2003
Revised: March 07, 2005
URL: http://webreference.com/programing/spring/1
