Book Review: Spring Recipes

I'm a really big fan of ColdSpring. I'd say that it is one of the key enablers for enterprise-class, object-oriented software development using ColdFusion. I can't imagine building a CF app without it now.

ColdSpring took its inspiration from the much larger, much more powerful Spring framework. ColdSpring represents but a mere subset of everything that Spring can do. That's not a knock against ColdSpring — Chris Scott was very clear about his intentions when he originally developed the framework. As I've tried to expand my knowledge of software development, and, more specifically, Groovy and Hibernate in particular, the Spring framework has come up again and again. I decided it was time to move beyond my ColdSpring-based understanding of Spring and try to learn about Spring itself.

The first stop on this journey has been "Spring Recipies: A Problem-Solution Approach," by Gary Mak. This is an intensive, though not exhaustive, look at what Spring has to offer. It covers all of the major components of Spring, above and beyond its very robust Dependency Injection framework.

The book covers numerous aspects of the larger Spring framework, including:

• The Basic and Advanced Spring Dependency Injection Container
• AoP in Spring: Classic, 2.0x and the AspectJ
• Spring JDBC templating
• Spring Transactions Framework (for database transactions)
• Spring + Hibernate
• Spring MVC
• Spring Testing Support for JUnit and TestNG
• Spring Security
• Integrating Spring with Portals and Portlets
• Spring Web Flow (of particular interest to me)
• Spring "Remoting"
• Spring support for scheduling and email

There are a few other topics covered as well, but the point of listing all that is covered in the book is to give you an idea of the depth and complexity of the Spring framework. Dependency injection is just one part of this ginormous (and some say needlessly complex) framework. One of the nice things about Spring is that although it's large and complex, you can use just the pieces you want: you don't have to utilize the _entire_ framework in building your Java application.

Each one of the above topics is given fairly good coverage in the book. Some topics are relatively straightforward and so don't get a lot of pages, while the more complex topics get many more pages. The writing is clear and the examples quite good, even for someone like me who isn't exactly an expert in Java development. It was very clear to me, after completing each major section, why I would or would not want to use a particular feature of the larger Spring framework. The examples, which are numerous, demonstrate Spring's power at templating otherwise duplicate code throughout whatever application development needs you may have. Yes, this results in more and more XML, though annotations go a long way to reducing the amount of XML in the configuration files.

One flaw in the book — and it's more a limitation of the printing industry than anything else — is that once the basic examples are out of the way, the author refers you to the online documentation for additional examples or much of an in-depth coverage of a particular aspect of the framework. This isn't entirely surprising, though. There are many books written about the individual parts of the larger Spring framework, so it's doubtful that one, single book could cover everything in depth and detail.

The book's clarity and intelligence has inspired me to learn more about some of what Spring can do. Spring Web Flow is really interesting to me, as a developer of Web applications, and I plan on learning more about it and figuring out how I can implement some adaptation of it in my own applications. I suppose that I should go and try to build a Spring-based application as well, but I like to bring things back to ColdFusion whenever possible.