Spring is one-stop shop for all your enterprise applications, however, Spring is modular, layered, allowing you to pick and choose which modules are applicable to you, without having to bring in the rest.
The Spring Framework provides about 20 modules which can be used based on an application requirement.
Following section gives detail about all the modules available in Spring Framework.
Core Container:
The Core Container consists of the Core, Beans, Context, and Expression Language modules whose detail is as follows:
The Core module provides the fundamental parts of the framework, including the IoC and Dependency Injection features.
The Bean module provides BeanFactory which is a sophisticated implementation of the factory pattern.
The Context module builds on the solid base provided by the Core and Beans modules and it is a medium to access any objects defined and configured. The
ApplicationContext interface is the focal point of the Context module.
The Expression Language module provides a powerful expression language for querying and manipulating an object graph at runtime.
Data Access/Integration:
The Data Access/Integration layer consists of the JDBC, ORM, OXM, JMS and Transaction modules whose detail is as follows:
The JDBC module provides a JDBC-abstraction layer that removes the need to do tedious JDBC related coding.
The ORM module provides integration layers for popular object-relational mapping APIs, including JPA, JDO, Hibernate, and iBatis.
The OXM module provides an abstraction layer that supports Object/XML mapping implementations for JAXB, Castor, XMLBeans, JiBX and XStream.
The Java Messaging Service JMS module contains features for producing and consuming messages.
The Transaction module supports programmatic and declarative transaction management for classes that implement special interfaces and for all your POJOs.
Web:
The Web layer consists of the Web, Web-Servlet, Web-Struts, and Web-Portlet modules whose detail is as follows:
The Web module provides basic web-oriented integration features such as multipart file-upload functionality and the initialization of the IoC container using servlet listeners and a web-oriented application context.
The Web-Servlet module contains Spring\'s model-view-controller (MVC) implementation for web applications.
The Web-Struts module contains the support classes for integrating a classic Struts web tier within a Spring application.
The Web-Portlet module provides the MVC implementation to be used in a portlet environment and mirrors the functionality of Web-Servlet module.
Miscellaneous:
There are few other important modules like AOP, Aspects, Instrumentation, Web and Test modules whose detail is as follows:
The AOP module provides aspect-oriented programming implementation allowing you to define method-interceptors and pointcuts to cleanly decouple code that implements functionality that should be separated.
The Aspects module provides integration with AspectJ which is again a powerful and mature aspect oriented programming (AOP) framework.
The Instrumentation module provides class instrumentation support and class loader implementations to be used in certain application servers.
The Test module supports the testing of Spring components with JUnit or TestNG frameworks.
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Ques 12. Please describe the basic modules of Spring Framework.
Spring comprises of seven modules. They are..
► The core container:
The core container provides the essential functionality of the Spring framework. A primary component of the core container is the BeanFactory, an implementation of the Factory pattern. The BeanFactory applies the Inversion of Control (IOC) pattern to separate an application's configuration and dependency specification from the actual application code.
► Spring context:
The Spring context is a configuration file that provides context information to the Spring framework. The Spring context includes enterprise services such as JNDI, EJB, e-mail, internalization, validation, and scheduling functionality.
► Spring AOP:
The Spring AOP module integrates aspect-oriented programming functionality directly into the Spring framework, through its configuration management feature. As a result you can easily AOP-enable any object managed by the Spring framework. The Spring AOP module provides transaction management services for objects in any Spring-based application. With Spring AOP you can incorporate declarative transaction management into your applications without relying on EJB components.
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Ques 13. What are the types of Dependency Injection Spring supports?
► Setter Injection:
Setter-based DI is realized by calling setter methods on your beans after invoking a no-argument constructor or no-argument static factory method to instantiate your bean.
► Constructor Injection:
Constructor-based DI is realized by invoking a constructor with a number of arguments, each representing a collaborator.
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Ques 14. What is the difference between Bean Factory and Application Context?
On the surface, an application context is same as a bean factory. But application context offers much more..
► Application contexts provide a means for resolving text messages, including support for i18n of those messages.
► Application contexts provide a generic way to load file resources, such as images.
► Application contexts can publish events to beans that are registered as listeners.
► Certain operations on the container or beans in the container, which have to be handled in a programmatic fashion with a bean factory, can be handled declaratively in an application context.
► ResourceLoader support: Spring�s Resource interface us a flexible generic abstraction for handling low-level resources. An application context itself is a ResourceLoader, Hence provides an application with access to deployment-specific Resource instances.
► MessageSource support: The application context implements MessageSource, an interface used to obtain localized messages, with the actual implementation being pluggable.
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Ques 15. How is a typical spring implementation look like?
For a typical Spring Application we need the following files:
► An interface that defines the functions.
► An Implementation that contains properties, its setter and getter methods, functions etc.,
► Spring AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming)
► A XML file called Spring configuration file.
► Client program that uses the function.