Springing to Spring's Defense

Lately there have been less Spring-related articles posted (or probably publicized). Some took it as a sign of decline in its popularity. What about the silent majority? Well, I believe that this bunch of people are not undecided, but are already happy saving the world from oblivion using Spring. Here's my story.

This blog entry's title is funny as in actual fact, Spring doesn't need any defending. It has been around since the early 2000s, when J2EE was exciting but full of teething issues. Ever since its introduction, the Java community has been gobbling every bit of goodness that came out of Rod Johnson's team. I can happily say that even though Spring has sort of 'matured' and may be daunting to a beginner, it still does one thing really well: IoC. Other Spring sub-projects are complements that build upon an already solid framework, which is really "true reuse" in action.

So, without further adieu, here's what I like about Spring that keeps me coming back to it:

1. Solid IoC Framework
This is worth repeating here. From the simple DTD to the flexible XML schemas and config annotations, the features for applying dependency injection made almost all hand-made singletons, factories unnecessary.

2. Great utility APIs
An example: JdbcTemplate made hand-coded DataSource-Connection-PreparedStatement-ResultSet (prone to connection leaks) code blocks obsolete. However using it doesn't require using the IoC container, which is great for refactoring legacy code without introducing drastic architectural changes. There are dozens more of such utility APIs that I won't elaborate here and leave it to the reader to explore.

3. Great 'glue' APIs
You like Struts, Quartz, Velocity, Freemarker, even Axis? How about JSF, Struts2, Hibernate or JPA? Spring has the integration code necessary for you to use a wide variety of other frameworks/APIs without attempting to supercede them. Spring even complements with its own offerings e.g. Spring MVC, Spring Web Services and Spring Security. You are not forced to accept the entire Spring stack. Just pick and choose.

4.Pick & Choose
Code-wise and even package-wise, Spring now comes in modules packed in different JAR files. The Spring developers wisely decided to abandon the "1 JAR to run them all" approach and let's the users include only the minimal JAR files required to use a specific feature.

5. Unit-Testing Support
EJB3 and above has better support that its predecessors but there's still no beating Spring with its support to run the IoC container outside of the application server. I use this feature everyday :)

Well, I'll stop here. I want to continue saving the world with Spring. Have a good day.