Yesterday (Thursday) we had our six-weekly get-to-together for the Web & Java Knowledge Center. This time the focus was the Spring Framework. Aino and Lucas presented on their findings from the Spring Workshop they had attended three weeks previously. In addition to just under 20 AMIS colleagues, we also had several guests in attendance.

We tried to get a broad overview of where Spring comes from, where it is heading for and what it is. Defining the Spring Framework is quite hard! It is a lot of things, and a lot of things for different people. We focused on a number of key-concepts and modules: Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection, AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming), Test Driven Development and POJO based architecture, Spring support for DAO and persistency (JDBC, Hibernate, Toplink, ibatis, JDO support) and Spring Remoting (support for WebService, RMI etc.). We also discussed Spring MVC and the integration in Spring with Struts and JSF.

We also briefly went into other features and recent development around Spring, such as support for JMX, JMS, Email, Scheduling, and also EJB! Near the end of the presentations/demonstrations we went into the combination of Spring and the Oracle Java Technology Stack, including the ADF Binding Framework and ADF Business Components. We concluded with a discussion on the short-term future of Spring within our organization. (Somewhere in between we also had pizzas). After the presentations (started at 16.30, ended around 20.20), we did some hands-on.

You can download the presentation, the workshop exercises and the demonstrations. Note: some of the material contains sections in Dutch. The workshop is created for JDeveloper 10.1.2. Before running the workshop, make sure to download the spring-framework-1.2.1-with-dependencies.zip file from SourceForge: Spring on SourceForge. In JDeveloper, create a library for Spring Framework containing all jar-files in this zip. Add this library to the projects you will use during ther workshop. Also see the PowerPoint in the Workshop Material zip-file.

Workshop Material: SpringKC30Jun_WorkshopMaterial.zip

Presentation: spring_30juni.ppt

Demonstrations: all demos are JDeveloper 10.1.2 projects. You can run the demos after you have added the Spring Framework library (see above). SpringKC30jun_Demonstrations.zip