Description
The best keeps getting better. More than a dozen years ago, Spring entered the Java development scene with the ambitious goal of simplifying enterprise Java development. It challenged the heavyweight programming models of the time with a simpler and lighter programming model based on plain old Java objects.
Now, several years and many releases later, we see that Spring has had a tremendous impact on enterprise application development. It has become a de facto standard framework for countless Java projects and has had an impact on the evolution of some of the specifications and frameworks that it originally set out to replace. It’d be hard to deny that the current Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) specification may have turned out very differently had Spring not challenged earlier versions of the EJB spec.
But Spring itself continues to evolve and improve upon itself, always seeking to make the difficult development tasks simpler and empower Java developers with innovative features. Where Spring had first set out to challenge the status quo, Spring now has leapt ahead and is paving trails in Java application development.
Therefore, it’s time for an updated edition of this book to expose the current state of Spring. There’s so much that has happened in the past few years since the previous edition of this book; it’d be impossible to cover everything in a single edition. Nevertheless, I still tried to pack this fourth edition of Spring in Action with as much as I could. Here are just a few of the exciting new things that have been added in this edition:
- An emphasis on Java-based Spring configuration with Java configuration options available for almost every area of Spring development
- Conditional configuration and profiles that make runtime decisions regarding what Spring configuration should be used or ignored
- Several enhancements and improvements to Spring MVC, especially with regard to creating REST services
- Using Thymeleaf with Spring web applications as an alternative to JSP
- Enabling Spring Security with Java-based configuration
- Using Spring Data to automatically generate repository implementations at runtime for JPA, MongoDB, and Neo4j
- Spring’s new declarative caching support
- Asynchronous web messaging with WebSocket and STOMP
- Spring Boot, a game-changing new approach to working with Spring
If you’re a seasoned Spring veteran, you’ll find that these new elements will become valuable additions to your Spring toolkit. On the other hand, if you’re new to Spring, you’ve picked a good time to learn Spring, and this book will help you get started.
This is, indeed, an exciting time to be working with Spring. It’s been a blast to develop with Spring and write about it during the past 12 years. I can’t wait to see what Spring does next!