Part 1. Core Spring

Spring does a lot of things. But underneath all of the fantastic functionality it adds to enterprise development, its primary features are dependency injection (DI) and aspect-oriented programming (AOP).

Starting in chapter 1, “Springing into action,” I’ll give you a quick overview of the Spring Framework, including a quick overview of DI and AOP in Spring and show how they help with decoupling application components.

In chapter 2, “Wiring beans,” we’ll dive deeper into how to piece together the components of an application. We’ll look at automatic configuration, Java-based configuration, and XML configuration options offered by Spring.

Chapter 3, “Advanced wiring,” goes beyond the basics and shows you a few tricks and techniques that will help you get the most power out of Spring, including conditional configuration, dealing with ambiguity when autowiring, scoping, and the Spring Expression Language.

Chapter 4, “Aspect-oriented Spring,” explores how to use Spring’s AOP features to decouple system-wide services (such as security and auditing) from the objects they service. This chapter sets the stage for later chapters such as chapters 9, 13, and 14 where you’ll see how to leverage Spring AOP for declarative security and caching.