Preface

There are a lot of books written about Spring Framework and its subprojects. A multitude of online references are also available. Most of these massive resources discuss Spring in a lot of detail, which makes learning Spring a very time-consuming and sometimes tedious effort. The idea of this book is to allow novice Java developers or architects to master Spring without spending much time and effort and at the same time provide them with a strong foundation on the topic in order to enable them to design high-performance systems that are scalable and easily maintainable.

We have been using Spring Framework and its subprojects for more than a decade to develop enterprise applications in various domains. While the usage of Spring quickly raises the design quality of projects with its smart templates and subframeworks abstracting many error-prone and routine programming tasks, a developer needs a thorough understanding of its concepts, features, best practices, and above all, the Spring programming model in order to utilize Spring to its best.

We have seen Spring used wrongly inside many projects mainly because the developer either didn't understand the right use of a particular Spring component or didn't bother to follow the design approach Spring suggests for that component. Often, developers didn't appear to have the right knowledge of Spring Framework; when asked, their complaint mostly was the uphill task of learning such a vast framework from huge documentation. Most of this category of developers find Spring a mammoth framework that is difficult to learn, which is not really true.

Spring, if the basics are understood correctly, is very easy to conquer further. A developer needs to understand the Spring style of programming and architecting applications, and the result will be a piece of art. The design will look simple, pretty straightforward, and easily understandable, which is very important for the evolution of applications in the long run. This book is an attempt to fill that gap and provide a very solid foundation in Spring, its concepts, design styles, and best practices, in a very quick and easy way.

This book tries to engage the reader by providing the feeling of developing a realistic, modern enterprise application using Spring and its necessary features while giving him or her a solid understanding of its concepts, benefits, and usage with real-life examples. It covers the most important concepts and features of Spring Framework and a few of its critical subprojects that are necessary for building modern web applications.

The goal of Spring is to simplify enterprise application development. We hope this book simplifies mastering Spring so that developers can build smarter systems that make the world a better place.