Benefits of Using the Spring Framework

Categories: Spring

Benefits of Using the Spring Framework

Following is the list of few of the great benefits of using Spring Framework:

• Spring enables developers to develop enterprise-class applications using POJOs. The benefit of using only POJOs is that you do not need an EJB container product such as an application server but you have the option of using only a robust servlet container such as Tomcat or some commercial product.
• Spring is organized in a modular fashion. Even though the number of packages and classes are substantial, you have to worry only about the ones you need and ignore the rest.
• Spring does not reinvent the wheel, instead it truly makes use of some of the existing technologies like several ORM frameworks, logging frameworks, JEE, Quartz and JDK timers, and other view technologies.
• Testing an application written with Spring is simple because environment dependent code is moved into this framework. Furthermore, by using JavaBeanstyle POJOs, it becomes easier to use dependency injection for injecting test data.
• Spring's web framework is a well-designed web MVC framework, which provides a great alternative to web frameworks such as Struts or other over-engineered or less popular web frameworks.
• Spring provides a convenient API to translate technology-specific exceptions (thrown by JDBC, Hibernate, or JDO, for example) into consistent, unchecked exceptions.
• Lightweight IoC containers tend to be lightweight, especially when compared to EJB containers, for example. This is beneficial for developing and deploying applications on computers with limited memory and CPU resources.

Dependency Injection (DI)

The technology that Spring is most identified with is the Dependency Injection (DI) flavor of Inversion of Control. The Inversion of Control (IoC) is a general concept, and it can be expressed in many different ways. Dependency Injection is merely one concrete example of Inversion of Control. When writing a complex Java application, application classes should be as independent as possible of other Java classes to increase the possibility to reuse these classes and to test them independently of other classes while unit testing. Dependency Injection helps in gluing these classes together and at the same time keeping them independent. What is dependency injection exactly? Let's look at these two words separately. Here the dependency part translates into an association between two classes. For example, class A is dependent on class B. Now, let's look at the second part, injection. All this means is, class B will get injected into class A by the IoC. Dependency injection can happen in the way of passing parameters to the constructor or by post-construction using setter methods. As Dependency Injection is the heart of Spring Framework.