Spring - Framework

The core container

• It provides fundamental functionality of the spring framework.
• Here you will find springs BeanFactory which applies IoC
• A BeanFactory is an implementation of the factory pattern that applies IoC to separate your application’s configuration and dependency specifications from the actual application code.

Application context module

• To the core functionality ,it adds support for internationalization messages and validation.
• It provides services such as e-mail, JNDI access, EJB integration.

AOP module

• It provides support for aspect oriented ptrogramming.
• It introduces metadata programming to spring.

JDBC abstraction and the DAO module

• By using this, you can keep your database code clean and simple and prevents from problem that result from a failure to close database resources.
• It also uses AOP to provide transaction management services for objects in spring application.

ORM Integration module

• It does not implement its own ORM but it provides hooks to framework that support ORM such as hibernate, JDO etc.
• Spring’s transaction management supports each of these ORM framework.

Spring’s Web module

• This web context module is built on application context module.
• It has support for several web oriented tasks for e.g. file upload, binding request object to business object.
• It also supports struts.

Springs MVC framework

• It comes with MVC framework for creating web applications.
• It can also be integrated with other MVC frameworks such as struts.
• It also takes advantage of springs other services such as validation, internationalization messages.

Spring - Features

• It is light weight in terms of size and overhead i.e. it can be distributed in a jar file called
• spring.jar whose size is appro. 1 MB and processing overhead is negligible.
• JavaBeans are loosely coupled.
• Code is simple to write.
• Spring application is easy to maintain and to test.
• Declarative programming without J2EE.
• It works on Inversion of control.This means objects are passively given their dependencies instead of creating or looking for dependent objects.
• It comes with rich support of aspect oriented programming.
• Spring is a container in the sense it contains and manages the life cycle configuration of application object.