Advanced Java Programmer: What is the Spring Framework?

The Spring Framework is an open source application framework that supports the development of Java applications by providing infrastructure support. It is one of the well-known Java Enterprise Edition frameworks. Spring helps developers create efficient applications by using Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs).

Before the introduction of Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), Java developers needed to use JavaBeans to create Web applications. While JavaBeans is useful for creating user interface (UI) components, it cannot provide services such as transaction management and security, which are critical for developing secure and reliable enterprise applications.

The introduction of EJB is considered to be the answer to this question. EJB extends Java components, including Web and enterprise components, and also provides services to help develop enterprise-level applications.

However, building enterprise applications with EJBs is difficult because developers must complete tasks such as creating main and remote interfaces and implementing lifecycle callback methods, all of which add to the complexity of writing EJB code. Because of this complexity, developers started looking for an easier way to build enterprise applications.

The Spring Framework is emerging as the solution to these problems. It uses several new technologies to build enterprise applications, including Plain Old Java Objects (POJO), Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP), and Dependency Injection (DI).

It removes the difficulties involved in creating enterprise applications using EJBs. Spring is an open source lightweight

A level framework that allows Java EE 7 developers to build simple, reliable, and scalable enterprise applications using AOP, POJO, and DI.

The main focus of the framework is to give you multiple options for managing your business assets. It makes the creation of web applications simpler than traditional Java frameworks and application programming interfaces (APIs) such as Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) and JavaServer Pages (JSP) and Java Servlets.

The Spring Framework can be thought of as a collection of sub-frameworks, also known as layers, such as Spring AOP, Spring Web Flow, Spring Object-Relational Mapping (Spring ORM), and Spring Web MVC. You can use any of these modules alone when building web applications. These modules can also be combined to provide better functionality in web applications.