Spring is an open source framework created to address the complexity of enterprise application development. One of the chief advantages of the Spring framework is its layered architecture, which allows you to be selective about which of its components you use while also providing a cohesive framework for J2EE application development.
In this first article in my four-part Spring Series, I introduce you to the Spring framework. I start by describing the functionality of the framework in terms of its underlying modules and then discuss two of the most interesting modules, Spring aspect-oriented programming (AOP), and the Inversion of Control (IOC) container. I then use several examples to demonstrate the workings of the IOC container in a typical application use case scenario. The examples will also lay the foundation for an expanded discussion, later in this series, of the how the Spring framework implements AOP constructs through Spring AOP.
The Spring framework is a layered architecture consisting of seven well-defined modules. The Spring modules are built on top of the core container, which defines how beans are created, configured, and managed, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. The seven modules of the Spring framework
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