Part 2. Spring application essentials

In part 1, you learned about Spring’s core container and its support for dependency injection (DI) and aspect-oriented programming (AOP). With that foundation set, part 2 will explore the framework features that Spring provides for building enterprise applications.

Most applications ultimately persist business information in a relational database. Chapter 5, “Hitting the database,” will guide you in using Spring’s support for data persistence. You’ll be introduced to Spring’s JDBC support, which helps you remove much of the boilerplate code associated with JDBC. You’ll also see how Spring integrates with the object-relational mapping persistence options, Hibernate and JPA.

Once you’re persisting your data, you’ll want to ensure that its integrity is preserved. In chapter 6, “Managing transactions,” you’ll learn how to declaratively apply transactional policies to your application objects using AOP.

In chapter 7, “Building web applications with Spring MVC,” you’ll learn the basics of using Spring MVC, a web framework built on the principles of the Spring Framework. You’ll discover Spring MVC’s vast selection of controllers for handling web requests and see how to transparently bind request parameters to your business objects while providing validation and error handling at the same time.

Chapter 8, “Working with Spring Web Flow,” will show you how to build conversational, flow-based web applications using the Spring Web Flow framework.

As security is an important aspect of many applications, chapter 9, “Securing Spring,” will show you how to use Spring Security to protect the information your application contains.