Willie Wheeler - Spring in Practice

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I started using Spring in 2004 after having used Enterprise JavaBeans 2 (EJB) for a couple of years. Unlike many who made the jump in those early days, I dont have any EJB horror stories to recount. My EJB project was too small to have had any serious technology issuespretty much any technology would have worked. Although I never fell in love with EJB, my team was able to make it work, so we didnt have any major complaints.

In 2004 I took a job with a new employer where everybody was using Spring. It was immediately clear to me that Springs POJO- and injection-based approach was simpler to use than EJB and that it resulted in cleaner code. Moreover, our Spring apps were supporting thousands of concurrent users without issue. Contrary to the orthodoxy of the day, Spring was certainly ready to take on enterprise demands without EJBs and heavyweight app servers.

My teams and I built a number of Spring apps. Even as a manager, I did quite a bit of hands-on development, and thats how I learned the framework. After a while, though, my management responsibilities made it harder to do as much development as I wanted to do. I started blogging about Spring (springinpractice.com) to maintain and expand my knowledge of the framework. Eventually, Manning came across my blog and asked me to write this book.

Nowadays I again do hands-on development, and to this day I use Spring for almost all of my Java development. Its a fantastic framework that makes development enjoyable and productive.

W ILLIE W HEELER

Early in my career, I worked on several large enterprise projects that used EJB 1.0. It quickly became evident to me that enterprise Java development was painful. Solutions were often complex, tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone. By the time Rod Johnsons book Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development came out in 2002, I was more than ready for a change. The ideas that Rod expressed in his book, and later incorporated into the Spring Framework, struck a chord not only with me but with the Java development community at large. Because the framework handled the infrastructure code for me, my code was cleaner, simpler, and less error-prone. It became clear that with Spring, I was more productive and enjoying development again. I have been an evangelist of the Spring Framework ever since.

As Spring grew, my thirst for knowledge about the framework, its surrounding technologies, and its ecosystem grew as well. Over the years, I had become an avid technical reader and soon found myself reviewing and providing technical input for other authors books. It wasnt until Manning provided me with the opportunity to team up with Willie and coauthor this book that I was able to experience being on the other side of the fence.

J OSHUA W HITE

Willie here. As a longtime acknowledgments reader, Im familiar with the typical expressions of gratitude aimed toward ones significant other, children, and other inconvenienced parties. But sitting now in the writers seat, I more fully appreciate how inadequate even the more vigorous of these expressions are.

I owe my first and largest debt to my wife, Raylene, who supported my efforts far beyond what was fair to ask or expect. Personal shame prevents me from describing the many sacrifices she made on my behalf, but, suffice it to say that shes eagerly looking forward to receiving her copy of the book so she can set it aflame. Thank you, Raylene, for making this book possibleyour name belongs on the cover of this book every bit as much as mine does.

Next, I thank our children, Max, Jude, Lucy, and Ben, two of whom have never known life without the book. They, like their mom, have been nothing but patient and supportive during the entire process, and I am deeply grateful.

Thanks to my in-laws, Ray, Jane, Renee, Rana, and Raymond, for making their home available to my family for many weekend getaways.

And, of course, big thanks to my coauthor, Josh, for helping get the book across the finish line.

Both Josh and I would like to thank the team at Manning: Marjan Bace, Cynthia Kane, Elizabeth Martin, Mary Piergies, Maureen Spencer, Tiffany Taylor, and Megan Yockey. A special and heartfelt thanks to our development editor, Cynthia Kane. Besides providing outstanding support on the editorial side, Cynthia was a driving force in seeing this project through to its successful completion. Thank you, Cynthia, for your expertise, patience, and support.

Thanks are due both to the technical reviewers and to the MEAP customers for their invaluable questions and feedback during the development process. Their efforts have made this a much better book. We would especially like to acknowedge Al Scherer, Brian OShea, Carol McDonald, Craig Walls, Daniel Alford, Deepak Vohra, Dmitry Sklyut, Erwin Vervaet, George Franciscus, Gordon Dickens, Jeremy Flowers, Jeroen Nouws, John Guthrie, John Ryan, John Tyler, Kenneth Kousen, Kenrick Chien, Mario Arias, Patrick Steger, Prasad A Chodavarapu, Rama Kanneganti, Ricardo Lima, Rizwan Lodhi, Robby OConnor, Robert Casazza, Robert Hanson, Ryan Stephens, Srikanth Balusani, and Willem Jiang.

And, finally, a special thanks to our technical editor, Doug Warren, whose tireless efforts and attention to detail resulted in many improvements throughout the book. We could not have done it without you!

Spring was originally conceived as a way to simplify Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) development, but its not exactly a simple framework. Its huge. The core framework is large, and dozens of portfolio projects extend that core, covering things like security, web flow, SOAP web services (REST web services are part of the core), enterprise integration, batch processing, mobile, various flavors of social (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, and so on), various flavors of NoSQL (MongoDB, Neo4j, Riak, and so on), BlazeDS/Flex, AMQP/Rabbit, and many more. If simple means something with few parts, then Spring isnt simple.