An application without data is like a car without fuel. Data is the heart of an application. Some applications may exist in the world without data, but these applications are simply showcase applications such as static blogs. Data is an important part of an application, and you need to develop data-access code for your application. This code should very simple, robust, and customizable.
In a traditional Java application, you could use JDBC to access the data. It is a very basic way, but sometimes, it is very messy to define specifications, handle JDBC exceptions, make database connections, load drivers, and so on. Spring simplifies these things by removing the boilerplate code and simplifying JDBC exception handling. You just write your SQL that should be executed in the application, and the rest is managed by the Spring framework.
In this chapter, you have seen how Spring provides support at the backend for data access and data persistence. JDBC is useful, but using the JDBC API directly...