Chapter 1. Introducing Spring Batch
This chapter covers
- Understanding batch applications in today’s architectures
- Describing Spring Batch’s main features
- Efficiently reading and writing data
- Implementing processing inside a job with Spring Batch
- Testing a Spring Batch job
Batch applications are a challenge to write, and that’s why Spring Batch was created: to make them easier to write but also faster, more robust, and reliable. What are batch applications? Batch applications process large amounts of data without human intervention. You’d opt to use batch applications to compute data for generating monthly financial statements, calculating statistics, and indexing files. You’re about to discover more about batch applications in this chapter. You’ll see why their requirements—large volumes of data, performance, and robustness—make them a challenge to implement correctly and efficiently. Once you understand the big picture, you’ll be ready to meet Spring Batch and its main features: helping to efficiently process data with various types of technologies—databases, files, and queues. We also honor the In Action series by implementing a real-world Spring Batch job. By the end of this first chapter, you’ll have an overview of what Spring Batch does, and you’ll be ready to implement your first job with Spring Batch. Let’s get started with batch applications!