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Your search returned 11 matching documents
Spring in Action
by
Craig Walls, Ryan Breidenbach, Laurent Mihalkovic,
Craig Walls, Ryan Breidenbach
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Manning Publications
1 edition
December 2004
472 pages
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Reviewed by Lasse Koskela, March 2005
        (8 of 10)
There's been a bit of a rush of books about the Spring Framework recently with a number of publishers releasing their own titles one after another. Without having read those other books, I feel confident in saying "Spring in Action" won't let you down. It's a wonderful introduction to the framework and a handy reference for those desperate moments with the Spring configuration files.
What I especially like about "Spring in Action" is the style of writing. The book is largely about how to configure this and that and still I read most of the book in one sitting. The text flows well and the humor sprinkled throughout adds a nice touch. The other good things about this book include a good coverage of the Spring Framework itself. Only some parts of the Acegi security framework have been left out, as far as I can tell, and those features (ACL's and run-as) are not what I'd call essential so it didn't bother me much. In addition, the authors give a good comparison (brief, but a good overview) of Spring and other technologies and frameworks such as EJB, Struts, WebWork, Tapestry, PicoContainer, HiveMind, etc. Furthermore, the authors show you how to integrate with these other frameworks (except for the other IoC containers) and view technologies like JSP, JSF, Velocity and FreeMarker. Add to that, the index looks very comprehensive which is an important detail for a book that one might use as a reference afterwards.
So, what separates this book from perfection? For one it had a lot of little typos, the text did exhibit a bit of repeat (didn't I just read this sentence on the previous page?) here and there, and I feel like mixing multiple ViewResolvers was covered too lightly. I don't consider these to be big issues, though, and I won't hesitate for a second in recommending "Spring in Action" for someone looking to get started with the framework.
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Manning Publications
second edition
August 2007
650 pages
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Reviewed by Mark Spritzler, December 2008
 (9 of 10)
The In Action series always seems to be the best material for Java development. The Hibernate/JPA book, Ajax, and also the JQuery In Action books are the must have books on their subjects.
Spring in Action follows that logic. It is the best book out there on the subject of Spring in Action, but for Spring 2.0 version. If only they updated it for Spring 2.5.x
But don't fret, this book is still very relevant, in many ways. A good 80-85% of the material all still work in 2.5 and is still the way to develop in 2.5. Core Spring with Dependency Inject, and AOP are must reads.
Also, if you are starting to work at a company that has a Spring project already in production, it is highly likely to see code as you see in this book.
Craig, we are waiting for the next version. We already know it will be another masterpiece
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Pro Spring
by
Rob Harrop, Jan Machacek
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Apress
1 edition
January 2005
832 pages
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Reviewed by Lasse Koskela, April 2005
(9 of 10)
Looking at "Pro Spring", one can immediately see that it packs a lot of information. The page count almost reaches 800 and the table of contents does indeed seem to cover pretty much anything there is to know about the Spring Framework. The first parts of the book introduce the Spring Framework on a bird's eye level, the sample application used throughout the book as a playground for the examples, and explain some basic concepts like Inversion of Control and Spring's basic bean-wiring facilities. After page 150 or so, it's all about digging deep inside the vast number of features and modules under the Spring umbrella.
The Spring AOP framework is introduced quite well, starting from the fundamentals like what is a pointcut, what is a joinpoint, etc. One really understands what the framework is about after reading through the AOP chapters. The data access part, which no doubt is of high interest to most readers, also does a good job on showing how the Spring JDBC framework works. It also presents a very nice "tutorial" on integrating Hibernate with Spring, although it's certainly not by any means a complete resource for learning Hibernate itself. The data access part also covers the iBATIS SqlMap framework for object-relational mapping (and actually uses more pages on that than for the Hibernate integration) which, on the other hand, was a nice surprise. Then again, the authors had decided not to cover Spring's JDO integration at all (only a brief mention somewhere near the beginning) which I would've expected. I gather JDO is not that widely used to date so maybe that isn't a problem (and the Hibernate stuff is very close to what the JDO integration looks like anyway). One specific thing I especially liked about the Hibernate chapter was that the authors had gone through the trouble of actually showing the SQL being generated for the different kinds of mappings. That's not really relevant for Spring but it was such a nice surprise that I felt like mentioning it anyway.
The heart of the book then covers "Spring in the middle tier", i.e. transaction management, integrating J2EE components such as Enterprise JavaBeans, job scheduling, sending email, and remoting with the various protocols supported by Spring. The technologies and APIs are not all there is to this part, though. Chapter 11 provides a more thorough discussion on good design practices and common pitfalls. Actually, the authors have managed to sprinkle these also elsewhere in the book in smaller amounts. The only thing that's really missing here is security, partly because the Spring core project doesn't provide much support for authentication and authorization (that's being handled either by custom frameworks or by the Acegi Security Framework project).
The last 100 pages before appendices have been dedicated to using Spring in web applications. The Spring MVC framework itself was described quite nicely, although I was left hanging a bit trying to wrap my head around the different base classes for controllers, resolvers, and so forth. Then again, I've had the same feeling with all (2) Spring books I've read so far. In addition to the standard JSP view, integration with the Velocity template engine and other alternative view technologies such as XSL transformations, the Tiles framework, PDF generation with iText, and Excel generation with the POI library are briefly demonstrated with JSP tags and Velocity macros getting most of the attention. One short chapter has also been dedicated for presenting the integration between Struts and Spring--a topic that many have struggled with.
Finally, the appendices showcase the Spring Rich project for building rich clients on top of Spring, the Spring IDE Eclipse plugin, and some features that are coming (or have already by now) soon such as JMX integration. Perhaps the most important appendix is, however, the one titled "Testing with Spring", which gets you going with unit and integration tests that use the Spring bean container. I would've loved to read more about this topic but even these few pages are a big help for a beginner since the first steps are often the most critical ones and having someone show initial direction can save the day.
In summary, "Pro Spring" is a good book and a valuable reference in learning Spring. It's not a book you'll want to carry around too much but it does include plenty of sample code (with just a few obvious typos that are easy to figure out) both Java code and the corresponding configuration elements. It's not the be-all-end-all reference for Spring but it's pretty close. A second edition with JDO and Acegi covered could be a full 10 horseshoes.
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Apress
1 edition
January 2005
832 pages
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Reviewed by Valentin Crettaz, March 2005
 (10 of 10)
Unless you have been living in a cave over the past 18 months, you have most certainly heard of the Spring Framework, the next generation lightweight framework, which integrates numerous widely supported technologies into a well-designed and extensible infrastructure that finally makes J2EE accessible to any frustrated expert and novice developer.
Aside from its impressive set of technical features, Spring's second invaluable asset is incontestably its extensive documentation and examples suite. However, note that Pro Spring is not a blatant clone of the supplied documentation. Instead, it takes a different route in that the authors gracefully introduce Spring by adopting a very pragmatic approach based on their real-world experiences with the framework. What you will read in this book is not theory at all. Fasten your seatbelts and get ready to see Spring at work in all its splendor. The authors spend over 700 pages showing you how to use Spring in practice when dealing with inversion of control, data access with JDBC, Hibernate and iBATIS, AOP, transaction management, EJB, JNDI, JMS, e-mail, Struts, MVC, and much more. Once you'll get through this book, you'll confess that Spring truly is an impressive framework and you'll even ask yourself how you could manage to develop your applications without it.
Finally, note that to get the most out of this book, you should be comfortable with J2EE concepts and the Java platform in general as the authors deliberately stay focused on Spring and its novelties.
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Spring into PHP 5
by
Steven Holzner
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Addison-Wesley Professional
1 edition
April 2005
360 pages
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Reviewed by Jeanne Boyarsky, August 2005
(9 of 10)
"Spring into PHP 5" is a good book for those new to programming. Readers need a very basic knowledge of HTML. Anything intermediate, like forms, is explained. Programmers (especially those who know Perl) can still learn PHP from this book since each section is clearly marked. They should just be prepared to skim a lot.
Books in this series consist of one to two page "chunks" grouped into chapters. Each chunk builds on previous ones, which provides for a nice flow. The chunks make it easy to understand what readers should get out of each section. Each chunk contains examples to apply these concepts. Many chunks also include screenshots of the input/output.
I found the book to be very clear. The appendices provide an excellent language reference. My only real complaint is that the book could use some best practices. Especially on when not to use a language features. All in all, the book is WYSIWYG. It lets you "spring into PHP" and get started very quickly.
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Pro Spring 2.5
by
Jan Machacek, Jessica Ditt, Aleksa Vukotic, Anirvan Chakraborty
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Apress
1 edition
August 2008
920 pages
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Reviewed by Mark Spritzler, December 2008
(9 of 10)
8 1/2, but since we only have 8 or 9, I liked it enough to make sure I rounded up instead of down.
I highly recommend this book to learn Core Spring. It is the only book currently out by Dec 08 that covers version 2.5. Other books still only cover 2.0
I found the writing easy to understand, I found that they covered the material very well with good examples. They cover a lot of material and leave you with great in-depth knowledge in each of those Spring technologies.
Now, I don't agree with everything they say in the book, but it isn't that they are wrong, but that I just disagree with certain statements. For example, in a Note section they stated that "They do not encourage the use of annotations on the objects you will persist using Hibernate." Using JPA Annotations, from an ORM tool expert, is a best practice and makes your life so much easier, in my opinion, and many other ORM experts. This note should have been left out of the book, unless they wanted to fully cover why.
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Spring Persistence with Hibernate
by
Ahmad Seddighi
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Packt Publishing
1 edition
November 25, 2009
460 pages
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Reviewed by Jeanne Boyarsky, January 2010
(5 of 10)
Packt's "Spring Persistence with Hibernate" covers Spring 2.5. (Take care that you don't confuse it with the soon to be released Apress book with the same title which covers Spring 3.0.)
Packt really needs to work on their editing process. I play a game when reading called "what page for the first typo." The answer was page 3! (chapter vs chapters). I have read some Packt books of good quality, but unfortunately this wasn't one. The numerous typos included basic English, a typo in a code comment on page 364 and worst a typo in a code block on page 24. The later bothers me more as the technical content becomes suspect. As with most Packt books, the examples are longer than I would like and could omit getters/setters earlier.
There were a few cases where I had to go to the JavaDoc to understand distinctions between attribute values. The book text wasn't clear enough and didn't explain when one might want to choose those values. There was also some explanation of how to do something in Hibernate if not using Spring and Spring MVC. Good content, but a bit surprising given the title.
Now for some things I liked: cooks tour example with forward references, coverage of Hibernate and JPA APIs, explanations of IOC and AOP, introduction of DAOs with patterns.
Overall, I'd recommend you pick a different Spring 2.5 book or wait for the Spring 3 books to come out.
Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review on behalf of JavaRanch.
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Spring Persistence with Hibernate (Beginning)
by
Paul Tepper Fisher, Brian D. Murphy
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Apress
1 edition
November 2010
264 pages
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Reviewed by Jeanne Boyarsky, December 2010
(7 of 10)
Apress' "Spring Persistence with Hibernate" covers Spring 3.0. (Take care that you don't confuse it with Packt's book with the same title which covers Spring 2.5)
The roadmap on the back cover implies you should have read "Beginning Spring" or "Beginning Hibernate." For an experienced developer, this isn't necessary. The key is that this book is fast moving so you should have some development background. It does cover beginner concepts - just faster.
The book goes beyond the title with bonus chapters on integration, Grails and Roo. It also covers the basic Spring MVC setup. I particularly liked the chapter with things to beware of including lazy loading and caching.
The only errors I caught were the case of @PostConstruct and @PreDestroy. They were consistenly wrong which makes me think it was edited after the authors last saw it. I also noticed a JUnit version mismatch while not wrong per se. Didn't affect readability though and the testing coverage was still good.
Overall, I was happy with the book.
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Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.
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Apress
1 edition
November 2010
264 pages
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Reviewed by Christophe Verre, January 2011
(8 of 10)
If you are looking for a book to learn about Spring and Hibernate, pass your way. If you are looking for a reference, pass your way. So who is this book for ? I think it is aimed at people who want to try a simple application using Spring3 and Hibernate 3.x (JPA2). It is fast paced, straight to the point. If you know what you are doing, it's a fun book. You'll start by setting your development environment (authors use Maven), configure Spring and Hibernate, make some domain classes, make some DAOs... Very fun. But don't expect to find answers if you're stuck somewhere.
There are some interesting explanations about persistence optimization like caching and lazy-loading, as well as a chapter about integration of frameworks like Dozer and Lucene. It also mentions REST and Spring MVC, and concludes with Grails and Spring Roo. These last two might be out of topic, but they have their own merit. I think they are worth reading.
I didn't notice many typos. Source snippets are neither too short nor too big. They illustrate well the explanation they are attached to. I already know about Spring3 and JPA2, but I never used Hibernate as my persistence provider. This book provided me a chance to try it. I felt it was not like any other technical books. Very enjoyable.
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Spring Roo in Action
by
Ken Rimple, Srini Penchikala
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Manning Publications
pap/psc edition
April 2012
408 pages
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Reviewed by Jeanne Boyarsky, May 2012
(8 of 10)
"Spring Roo in Action" starts out with an example. Similar to the "Rails demo" where you build a complete application in 15 minutes. The book then moves on to how to use the shell and your IDE with Roo. I particularly liked the part about which files are safe to change vs which are Roo only.
The tricky thing with Roo is that readers need to understand a bit about the technologies Roo is generating code for in order to understand the examples. (Spring MVC, JPA, Dojo, Ajax, etc.) The authors cover "the least you need to know to follow." It's more useful as a review than if you've never use the technology. But if you've never used the technology, you wouldn't be generating code for it and expecting to understand it anyway.
The other tricky thing in a book like this is that the authors are experts on Roo (and many other things) but not necessarily everything in the book. For example, the JUnit section mixes junit.framework with org.junit packages (3.8 vs 4.0). And assertTrue(a.size() == b.size()) which gives a less clear assertion failure than assertEquals(a, b). This isn't important but I'd caution against assuming everything you read is a best practice.
However, the Spring and Roo parts of the book are excellent and I couldn't find any anti-patterns in there. In a Roo book, that's what you want to see.
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Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.
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Getting started with Spring Framework
by
J Sharma, Ashish Sarin
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CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
edition
December 2012
324 pages
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Reviewed by Jeanne Boyarsky, December 2012
(6 of 10)
"Getting Started with Spring Framework" is an intro to Spring book. It covers less material than Manning's "Spring in Action"; however it is a shorter read and costs $15 less, so that's ok.
The explanations were fine. There were lots of code examples. My favorite part was the excellent diagrams. I liked all of the chapters except chapter 1. There were a couple of places in later chapters where multiple ways of doing something were presented, and it wasn't clear why you'd choose each way.
But what didn't I like about chapter 1 you ask? The chapter starts with a statement that rubbed me the wrong way. To paraphrase: in the old world, developers had to create well structured easily testable maintainable apps-- the implication being that Spring somehow relieves you of this duty. The truth is that you can create a pile of crud in Spring, too. This felt like "Spring is magic" salesmanship and it put me in a bad mood. The rest of the chapter was a mix of concepts critical to understand and a high level overview of things you never see in the book again.
I was also taken aback that the author tells readers to download Spring 3.2.0 RC 2. I think it's great that the author was testing with the latest and greatest. It's fine to mention that (although putting it on the back cover is pushing it.) However, someone just learning Spring should not use the release candidate version.
The book was self published and this was evident in a few ways. I saw a typo early on ("quiet" vs "quite"), some organizational issues which would have been brought up by an editor, and in general the layout looks like someone just printed a PDF and stuck it in a book with page breaks in some odd spots. The index had a great list of annotations but was missing common words like "security" and "transaction." I guess what I'm saying is that you'd be better off buying the e-book than the printed version.
Ultimately, the book was "fine". You can learn Spring from it. If you're looking to save a few bucks and don't need to learn about Spring for web apps, it's probably a good idea. $17 for the e-book and $29 for the printed copy is very inexpensive for a computer book. But I found Manning's "Spring in Action" was a better read.
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Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.
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Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow
by
Seth Ladd, Darren Davidson, Steven Devijver, Colin Yates
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Apress
1 edition
February 2006
424 pages
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Reviewed by Lasse Koskela, May 2006
(9 of 10)
While many of the top notch Spring books offer reasonably thorough coverage of the Spring MVC framework along with other core Spring modules, there's not much printed material on Spring Web Flow. This book gives the Spring community a fix that'll keep us satisfied for the time being.
The authors do a good job at introducing in just a dozen pages enough fundamental concepts that a Java web developer needs in order to be ready for the rest of the book. In other words, no long-winded descriptions of the XML configuration files needed for configuring Spring, no detailed descriptions of how to wrap your beans into proxies, etc. Instead, you're taken straight down to business.
The core of the book starts out by first describing the Spring MVC architecture, including the role of controllers and views. Followed by the description of the architecture, the authors take the reader to a rollercoaster ride through the Spring MVC processing pipeline, including how to customize URL mappings, for example.
The chapter on controller components covers everything I can think of and the chapter on views and different view types does a great job at showing how to configure alternative view resolvers, how to internationalize your application's message resources, and how to render alternative content types such as PDF and Excel sheets in addition to covering the mainstream templating languages used for generating HTML, including JSP and JSTL as well as open source frameworks such as Velocity and FreeMarker.
An extra bonus point goes to the authors for including a section on testing Spring applications, even though the focus is mostly on unit testing controllers which is kind of a low-hanging fruit anyway. On the other hand, while topics such as validation and internationalization are discussed, the equally essential aspects of authentication and authorization are not given any attention.
The last two chapters, approximately 60 pages, are devoted to the brand new Spring Web Flow framework. I was glad to see the authors' pragmatic approach to stating the sweet spot for using Web Flow rather than proposing it as the "golden hammer" as they say. The explanation of the Web Flow concepts as well as the examples the authors use for guiding the reader through them are easy to understand.
As a summary, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and got a lot out of it. The only reason I'm not giving this book the absolute best rating possible is that there's a couple of security-related topics missing that I consider essential for any book dedicated to developing web applications.
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Apress
1 edition
February 2006
424 pages
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Reviewed by Andrew Monkhouse, May 2006
(9 of 10)
This is a very good book for learning the Spring MVC framework. While the authors explicitly state that the book is not an introduction to Spring, they do provide a chapter to introduce Spring as a foundation for the remainder of the book.
The purpose for each topic is clearly described, with easy to understand examples provided, then some sample code is presented with explanations.
In the introduction to the book, the authors describe their "aha" moment, where they first understood the ramifications of using this framework. Their desire to share this feeling shows through in their writing without becoming tiring.
I heartily recommend this book to anyone wishing to learn the Spring MVC framework.
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Agile Java Development with Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse
by
Anil Hemrajani
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Sams
1 edition
May 2006
360 pages
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Reviewed by Balaji Loganathan, February 2007
(9 of 10)
Bought and read this book from Safari-O'Reilly online.
The title itself gets the mood on.
This book will help you to understand and get started with Spring-Hibernate-Eclipse kind of projects.
This book is definitely a best shot for beginners in JEE.
Its not complete reference for every topics the author addresses, but will sure give you extended overview on XP, Agile etc.,
If you want to get started with your spring project immediately then this book is worth buying.
This book doesn't cover Spring AOP - Hmm.. Its a pity.
Its interesting to see the chapters that start with a discussion between programmers and client.
Getting the sample code up and running is also just a click of a Ant build button.
Configuring Eclipse/Spring/ANT have been covered in detail while many other key technologies were just started and finished on a single page.
The appendix were quite useful, like AMDD, XP cheatsheet
Most commonly used technologies in JEE were addressed, so you can get to know what JEE is all about.
Altogether i recommend this book for Beginners and Intermediates to get know the beautiful world of JEE.
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Beginning Spring 2: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional)
by
Dave Minter
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Apress
1 edition
December 2007
271 pages
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Reviewed by Jeanne Boyarsky, August 2009
(7 of 10)
"Beginning Spring 2 - From Novice to Professional" is a clear introduction to Spring. The book was designed to be readable whether you are new to Spring or have been using Spring 1.X. Chapter one covers the main concepts such as inversion of controller and aspect oriented programming. The description of why they are useful read very nicely.
There was (mostly) a good balance of code to description along with good discussion on tradeoffs. I like how the author included tangential concepts and libraries. I learned about Hessian and Burlap - two reporting tools I hadn't heard of. I was a little surprised there were only two paragraphs on JMS - seems like it would be more popular.
There were a couple of typos, but nothing major. I was a bit disappointed by the testing chapter - one sentence contained four negatives which was awkward to read. A test method was over a page long. Examples are JUnit 3.8 (4.0 was out and well used in 2007.) In fact most of my concerns were in this last chapter. The Swing chapters were better.
I did learn about Spring and that was the goal of the book. I do recommend it.
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