Chapter 10. Hitting the database with Spring and JDBC
This chapter covers
- Defining Spring’s data-access support
- Configuring database resources
- Working with Spring’s JDBC template
With the core of the Spring container now under your belt, it’s time to put it to work in real applications. A perfect place to start is with a requirement of nearly any enterprise application: persisting data. You have probably dealt with database access in an application in the past. In practice, you’ll know that data access has many pitfalls. You have to initialize your data-access framework, open connections, handle various exceptions, and close connections. If you get any of this wrong, you could potentially corrupt or delete valuable company data. In case you haven’t experienced the consequences of mishandled data access, it’s a Bad Thing.
Because we strive for Good Things, we turn to Spring. Spring comes with a family of data-access frameworks that integrate with a variety of data-access technologies. Whether you’re persisting your data via direct JDBC or an object-relational mapping (ORM) framework such as Hibernate, Spring removes the tedium of data access from your persistence code. Instead, you can lean on Spring to handle the low-level data-access work for you so that you can turn your attention to managing your application’s data.