Foreword

Back in 2001, when I wrote the first lines of code that came to be the Spring Framework, I could not have envisaged the size of the community that would grow around the core ideas. The vision of a simpler, more productive J2EE—simplifying the programming model without sacrificing the power of the platform—resonated with many developers. In turn, as the community grew, their collective experience fed back into making the project stronger.

I welcome this book as another step in the growth of the Spring community. I'm excited to see the number of quality publications on Spring grow. While Spring's online documentation has always been excellent and a focus of major effort for us in the Spring team, a wide-ranging and sophisticated framework such as Spring needs to be approached from a number of angles. Reference documentation can tell you what a framework does, but it's even more important to know why and when. Books like this are far more than simply a reference on the framework; they place it in the context of real-world software development. Spring is perhaps unique among J2EE frameworks in that the architectural vision behind it was articulated in book form from its inception, in Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB took this one step further, describing how Spring and other lightweight containers can be used as the basis of the next generation of J2EE architectures. Nevertheless, as the scope of Spring continues to expand at a rapid rate and the Spring core grows ever more sophisticated, it is increasingly important for developers to have books like Pro Spring, which cover both the big picture and the myriad of specific details that can help you be more productive.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Rob Harrop for the first time, at JavaPolis 2004. We've worked together on various Spring features since Rob became a Spring developer, but it was good finally to meet face to face. Rob's enthusiasm for Spring—and technology in general— is infectious. He has a wide range of industry experience and a refreshingly practical, common- sense approach to applying it.

All those qualities come out in this book. It's evident on nearly every page that it reflects in- depth experience with Spring and J2EE as a whole. Rob is not only an author and open source developer—he is an application developer, like his readers. I firmly believe that the best writing on software development comes out of experience in the trenches, so this is my kind of book.

If you're new to Spring, this book will help you understand its core concepts and the background in areas such as transaction management and O/R mapping that underpins them. If

you're already using Spring, you will learn about features you haven't yet seen and hopefully, gain a deeper understanding of those features you're already using.

Rod Johnson
Founder of the Spring Framework
London
December, 2004

About the Authors

ROB HARROP is the chief software architect of the UK-based development house, Cake Solutions Limited (www.cakesolutions.net). At Cake Solutions, Rob leads a team of six developers who work on enterprise solutions for a variety of clients including the Department of Trade and Industry, the Metropolitan Police, and NUS Services Limited.

Rob is one of the 17 committers on the Spring project (www.springframework.org) and is involved in work on Spring AOP, MVC, and JMX. Rob is also a member of the JSR-255 Expert Group for JMX 2.0.

Rob is the author of Pro Jakarta Velocity: From Professional to Expert (Apress, 2004) and is coauthor of Pro Jakarta Struts, Second Edition (Apress, 2004), Oracle Application Server 10g: J2EE Deployment and Administration (Apress, 2004), and Pro Visual Studio .NET (Apress, 2004).

In his limited spare time, Rob enjoys playing with different technologies; his current favorites are Groovy and Aspect Oriented Programming. When he is not sitting in front of a computer, Rob usually has his head buried in a book and prefers the fantasy parodies of Terry Pratchett's Discworld.

Rob authored Chapters D.

JAN MACHACEK is lead developer of UK-based software company

Cake Solutions Limited, where he has helped design and implement enterprise-level applications for a variety of UK- and US-based clients. In his spare time, he enjoys exploring software architectures, nonprocedural and AI programming, and playing with computer hardware.

Jan is the coauthor of Oracle Application Server 10g: J2EE Deployment and Administration (Apress, 2004) and Pro Visual Studio .NET (Apress, 2004).

A proper computer geek, Jan loves the Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings series. Jan lives in Manchester, UK.

Jan authored Chapters B.