As a result of my research into “Hibernate”:http://www.hibernate.org that I’ve been doing over the last couple of weeks, I can across enough references to the “Spring Framework”:http://www.springframework.org/ for me finally to give it a look. I was quickly hit by the wealth of information out there, however nothing really provides a good concise overview – the Spring Framework “tutorial”:http://www.springframework.org/ for example is a 48 page PDF which gives an overview of each package in turn – not my idea of a tutorial at all. There seems to be an inordinate amount of waffle on the subject – looking at the petclinic example in the distribution, I can understand some of Spring’s power, but at the same time it can be very confusing. I’m fairly sure I can come up with a more concise getting started guide, which I’m going to aim to do over the next week or so.
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magpiebrain 
7 Responses to “The Spring Framework”
have you looked into the ‘step-by-step’ tutorial available at
http://www.springframework.org/docs/MVC-step-by-step/Spring-MVC-step-by-step.html
?
Yes, I found that walkthrough recently. I would of prefered something which gave a ‘block-diagram’ view of the MVC arcitecture. Its making sense to me now – much of the confusion was bought about by the petclinic example that comes with the distribution. The problem is I’m historically a struts user, and struts user forms objects are very beasts. In Spring a form is almost doing the job of the action class as well. I’m thinking about renaming my Spring web-form’s ‘handlers’ or something to avoid the confusion – dealing with 2 frameworks at work, and 2-3 completely different ones at home, is getting a bit much…
Sam,
What are your feelings about Spring now? It has been 7 months? I am a struts user and evaluting Spring for some future work. I have found the concepts hard (being somewhat biased).
Michael
Well, to summarise a few points at once:
* IoC is not new – its just plain good sense
* You don’t need Spring or Pico to make IoC work, but it helps
* If you want to embed an IoC type container in your own code and use nothing apart from your own code, Pico is a good choice as its damn small
* If you want to use an IoC framework with third party API’s, Spring is excellent
Hope that helps!
You can find number of good “hello world” examples of spring at:
http://gabriel.jarchitect.org/spring/index.html
the above seems to have been moved to http://www.jarchitect.org/web/document.php?id=1
Try my tutorial.
http://www.newspiritcompany.com/withspring.html