The past two years have seen a growing trend towards lightweight architectures as alternatives to traditional EJB-centric architectures. In this approach, application services and domain objects are designed as POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects), resulting in fine-grained application components that are reusable and testable outside a container. This can significantly increase productivity and allows easier use of agile processes in J2EE development. Key enabling technologies include lightweight containers such as Spring and HiveMind, and O/R mapping frameworks such as Hibernate, JDO and TopLink.

This session introduces the Spring Framework and its lightweight container architecture, focusing on its powerful Dependency Injection capabilities, the Spring AOP framework and the popular Spring JDBC framework. It will highlight Spring’s transaction management capabilities–in particular, declarative transactions for POJOs–and illustrate data access object design for strategies such as JDBC and Hibernate, which are supported out-of-the-box and integrated in a consistent architectural style.

The session will discuss the value-add of using a lightweight container within a J2EE application, contrasting it with traditional programming models. It will show that Spring does not compete with J2EE servers and the core system services provided by them; instead, Spring adds architectural value within J2EE applications, leveraging J2EE services without coupling application components to a concrete J2EE environment.

Attendees will learn about the motivation for the lightweight container movement and the benefits of a lightweight, test-driven, development approach from two pioneers in the area who are also best-selling authors on the topic. They will learn about the valuable services that the Spring Framework provides for a wide variety of architectural scenarios.