Spring Subprojects

Just when you thought you had heard enough about Spring, there is more.

What we have looked at so far are modules and packages that are part of the Spring's core distribution. There are also other subprojects hosted by the Spring team that can be found via the springframework.org website:

• Acegi Security System for Spring This project provides comprehensive security services for the Spring Framework (for example, HTTP security, object instance security, security taglib, password encoding, and more).

• Spring BeanDoc This tool facilitates documentation and graphing of a Spring application's bean factories and application context file. A very useful, easy, and flexible tool to use.

• Spring IDE for Eclipse This is a graphical user interface for the configuration files used by a Spring-based application. We will see a preview of this in Chapter 8, "The Eclipse Phenomenon!"

• Spring Rich Client I have not personally worked with this project, so I will quote the Spring website, which claims that this is a "viable option for developers that need a platform and a 'best-practices' guide for constructing Swing applications quickly."

• Spring Web Flow This project is based on the concepts similar to the Spring Web MVC Framework, essentially providing wizardlike screen functionality to implement a business process. This project has been getting a lot of attention recently and is worth checking out if you need the type of functionality it provides.