Preface

I started using Spring in 2004 after having used Enterprise JavaBeans 2 (EJB) for a couple of years. Unlike many who made the jump in those early days, I don’t have any EJB horror stories to recount. My EJB project was too small to have had any serious technology issues—pretty much any technology would have worked. Although I never fell in love with EJB, my team was able to make it work, so we didn’t have any major complaints.

In 2004 I took a job with a new employer where everybody was using Spring. It was immediately clear to me that Spring’s POJO- and injection-based approach was simpler to use than EJB and that it resulted in cleaner code. Moreover, our Spring apps were supporting thousands of concurrent users without issue. Contrary to the orthodoxy of the day, Spring was certainly ready to take on enterprise demands without EJBs and heavyweight app servers.

My teams and I built a number of Spring apps. Even as a manager, I did quite a bit of hands-on development, and that’s how I learned the framework. After a while, though, my management responsibilities made it harder to do as much development as I wanted to do. I started blogging about Spring (springinpractice.com) to maintain and expand my knowledge of the framework. Eventually, Manning came across my blog and asked me to write this book.