Spring in action - Craig Walls

A guide to the lightweight container framework that presents an exciting alternative to EJB

J2EE offers Java developers a very powerful enterprise framework. But portions of J2EE can be complicated--specifically Enterprise JavaBeans. By shouldering the burden of J2EE's complexities and providing the developer with a much simple abstraction, Spring makes developing J2EE application significantly simpler. It also provides a viable alternative to EJB, providing many of the same features offered by EJB, but without EJB's complexities.

Written for enterprise Java developers who have become disillusioned with the complexity and bulk involved with EJB development, "Spring in Action" demonstrates how the Spring framework can make coupled code easy to manage, understand, reuse, and unit-test. Spring's employment of inversion control and aspect-oriented programming techniques to encourage loosely coupled code is explained, providing programmers with the ability to use JavaBeans with the power and enterprise services only previously available in the heavier Enterprise JavaBeans.

Even hard-core EJB fanatics may find some value in this book as the next specification of EJB will more closely resemble Spring than the current EJB specification. Software architects will find Spring in Action valuable in assessing and applying the lightweight techniques prescribed by Spring.