Sunday, June 26, 2005

It's going to be a beautiful spring...

What happens to me? Summer has been here for five days and I start talking about spring... Well, in fact, I mean to talk about this Spring.

Yes, the Spring framework is beautiful. Not only: it is a friendly framework that goes where you want, without forcing you to subclass its objects. It is full of facilitators that make a developer's life really easier.

I already had this academic knowledge. Since a few days, I have tasted the true nature of Spring, and my life has changed.

I have just started a new open source project (jinFORM) and after a few days already used these features:

  • the Dependency Injection framework (the true core of Spring) for gluing all the components together (bye bye infamous Mr. Service Locator!),

  • web flow for MVC support, easy URL/controller mapping and centralized exception support,

  • EHCache support, for a no-brainer instantiation of the cache manager,

  • AOP for introducing Serializable in DOM documents and JAXP XSL Templates, where this interface is missing, which prevents them from being cached,

  • property file support for easily injecting configuration values into beans,

  • and many utilities like the so convenient FileCopyUtils...
Next step will be to use Spring for easily exposing internal objects as JMX beans!

If you have not started to use Spring, please do yourself a favor and follow this link.

Kudos to the Spring team!