Part 1. Background

What is Spring Batch? What is it good for? Is it the right tool for you? You’ll find the answers to these questions in the next two chapters. Of course, you won’t be a Spring Batch expert by the end of this first part, but you’ll have a good foundation and understanding of all the features in Spring Batch.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of batch applications and Spring Batch. To follow the In Action tradition, we also show you how to implement a real-world batch job with Spring Batch. This introduction not only covers how Spring Batch handles the classical read-process-write pattern for large amounts of data but also shows you the techniques used to make a job more robust, like skipping invalid lines in a flat file.

Chapter 2 clearly defines the domain language used in batch applications and explains how Spring Batch captures the essence of batch applications. What are a job, a step, and a job execution? Chapter 2 covers all of this and introduces how Spring Batch tracks the execution of jobs to enable monitoring and restart on failure.