What You Need to Use This Book

To run the sample application and examples, you will need:

• The Spring Framework version 1.2 or later.

• A J2EE web container or/and application server. We used Tomcat 5 where only a web container was required, and WebLogic 8.1 where an application server was required. However, Spring is designed for portability between application servers, and we also tested our code on other products. Thus you do not need to use any particular server product; you can use whatever product you are most familiar and comfortable with.

• A relational database and appropriate JDBC drivers. You should be able to modify our DDL fairly easily to work with the database of your choice.

• The Hibernate O/R mapping framework, version 3.0, available from www.hibernate.org.

• Various third-party libraries, including Jakarta Commons Logging. The necessary JAR files are included with the full Spring distribution; see documentation with Spring for details.

• The JUnit testing tool, ideally integrated with your IDE.

• The popular Jakarta Ant build tool.

All this software is open source or free for developer use.

We recommend a good Java IDE with refactoring support, such as Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA. Such tools either ship with or can easily be integrated with validating XML editors that provide code assistance. These are helpful when editing Spring XML bean definition documents and other XML artifacts such as Hibernate mapping files, iBATIS SQL Maps definition files, and J2EE deployment descriptors. You should never need to edit XML content purely by hand.