Foreword
The origin of Spring Batch as an open source project goes back to the time when I joined a relatively new and small company called Interface21.[1] Many existing clients, and one big partner (Accenture), had repeatedly run into problems because the open source community lacked such a framework. Every IT project that needed offline processing found that they had to reinvent the basic features of deployment, processing patterns, and reliability. Then, and to this day, these are the unavoidable but necessary features of many environments across a wide range of industries.
1 Interface21 went on to rebrand itself as SpringSource (http://www.springsource.org) before becoming a division of VMware (http://www.vmware.com) in 2009.
Who should read this book? For sure anyone who wants to learn how to use Spring Batch from the ground up. Some knowledge of the Spring Framework and familiarity with Spring programming models and common practices are more or less mandatory, but these are common skills and easily obtained elsewhere. Spring Batch isn’t all that difficult to get started with once you have basic Spring knowledge. But the more you use a complex tool, the more you’ll find that it pays to understand its inner workings, and even seasoned practitioners of Spring Batch applications will find much of the book rewarding reading.