Chapter 1. Introducing Spring: the dependency injection container

In this chapter, we’ll provide a brief overview of the Spring Framework, beginning with a discussion of what Spring is and giving an overview of its major pieces. Then we’ll delve into the underlying principles behind the Spring Framework, and talk about inversion of control and how it relates to dependency injection. Finally, we’ll dive into a small example that shows how to use the Spring Core Container hands-on. Let’s get started.

1.1. What is Spring, and why use it?

The Spring Framework is an open source application framework created to simplify the development of enterprise Java software. The framework achieves this goal by providing developers with a component model and a set of simplified and consistent APIs that effectively insulate developers from the complexity and error-prone boilerplate code required to create complex applications.

1.2. Flexible configuration via dependency injection

1.3. A simple bean configuration example

1.4. Wiring beans using XML

1.5. Autowiring and component scanning using annotations

1.6. Summary