What is spring?

Java is still one of the most popular programming languages ​​on the market . According to the TIOBE Index Java currently remains in third place behind Python and C. According to the PYPL Index , Java is number 2 behind Python. This popularity means your company will likely consider Java for many types of projects, including apps and layers for Android, web, IoT, cloud, gaming, data science, and research.

Java is an incredibly flexible and powerful language that most companies can't avoid.

During your developers' journey with Java, they will encounter countless tools and frameworks, each designed to help make the task of working with this language easier, more efficient, and more powerful.

One such framework is Spring. Spring is not a typical developer framework. Spring is a Java-based platform that provides comprehensive infrastructure support for application development. With Spring, your developers can spend their time focusing on the application rather than the infrastructure.

With Spring, your developers can build applications from Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs) and then apply enterprise services to those POJOs. And Spring serves as the foundation for understanding all projects under the Spring umbrella, such as Spring Boot, Spring Data, and Spring Batch.

In fact, without understanding the Spring framework, your developers will have difficulty understanding the other tools available in the Spring toolkit.

What is spring?

You already know that Spring is a framework. But as we mentioned, it's not a typical structure. Consider the web application, which is composed of 3 dependent layers:

• UI layer
• Business logic layer
• Data Access Layer

Each of these layers requires the others for the whole to work, and each layer can include hundreds (or even thousands) of classes and dependencies. This is where Spring comes in. Without Spring in action, each component of an application would have to be tightly coupled, otherwise the whole would fail. However, this interdependent scheduling is not considered a best practice. When you program components that are so integrated, the slightest change to one component will affect the others.

With Spring you can practice much looser coupling, which means that a change in one component will not affect the functioning of others.

To this end, Spring is associated with the Dependency Injector approach to Inversion of Control.

What is Inversion of Control (IoC)?

When we talk about Inversion of Control, we refer to the inversion of control flow in object-oriented design that achieves low coupling. For example, consider your primary mode of transportation. Every morning when you leave for work, you get in your car and drive alone. It's you controlling the car. If we apply Inversion of Control to this, you can leave your house and use public transport to get to work. In this case, another person controls the vehicle.

With Inversion of Control, Spring enables you to create a functional whole from disparate components.

It's all about modules

Spring achieves all of this through modules. There are around 20 Spring modules, which are organized into the following categories:

• Core Container: Provides the fundamental pieces of the framework, including Beans, Core, Context, Expression Language, as well as the bits to make IoC and dependency injection possible.
• Data Access/Integration: Provides an abstraction layer that eliminates the need to deal with JDBC coding parsing of database vendor error codes. This module includes JDBC, ORM, OXM, JMS, Transactions.
• Network: Provides basic web functionality and includes Web, Servlet, Portlet, Struts.
• AOP/Aspects/Instrumentation: Provides a complaint programming implementation for defining method interceptors and cutoffs to help decouple code.
• Testing: Supports JUnit and TestNG testing of Spring components.

What is aspect oriented programming?

You will also need to understand the concept of aspect-oriented programming (AOP). In object-oriented programming (OOP), the component that offers modularity is the class. In AOP, modularity is possible through aspect. This is possible because it allows for the separation of cross-cutting concerns by adding additional behavior to existing code without modifying the code itself.

When working with the AOP model, you can add behaviors without overloading the code that is critical to the application's functionality. This is possible by dividing the programming logic into separate parts (called concerns). Some concerns (like logging) “cut across” numerous abstractions. These concerns are called cross-cutting concerns. All AOP implementations include cross-cutting concerns.

All of this is brought together by “linking” classes with an XML file so that all objects are instantiated and initialized by Spring. Ultimately, Spring is a method for simplifying the creation of Java-based websites and services that rely on databases. With Spring you will find that you can structure entire applications in a consistent and productive way.

Why should you use Spring?

There are several reasons why you should consider using Spring. On the one hand, Spring has become the de facto standard framework for building Java-based web applications. Spring is also capable of exposing RESTful services. Additionally, it also includes Spring Security, which adds authentication and authorization to the mix.

Other reasons include:

• Easier communication with databases
• Better handling of long-running jobs
• Easily handle external resources
• Excellent tests
• Can be used for standalone Java projects
• Can be used to convert applications into executables
• Makes it possible to integrate social media into your apps
• Rapid prototyping
• Makes it easier to get started

Conclusion

Spring is a complicated framework, but its developers should certainly take the time to understand it. If your company needs rapid deployment of flexible, decoupled Java web applications and services, Spring is the framework you need.