Introducing the Spring Framework

Spring architecture fundamentals

• Identifying Spring application components
• Defining the n-tier application architecture

Applying Inversion of Control (IoC) and Dependency Injection (DI)

• Delegating object creation to the Spring bean factory
• Controlling bean creation with scopes and factory methods
• Initialising and destroying beans

Minimising Code with Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP)

Transparently applying common functionality

• Evaluating the benefits of AOP
• Defining advice, pointcuts and advisors
• Minimising configuration with Autoproxying

AspectJ style AOP

• AspectJ pointcut expression language
• Applying AspectJ style with annotations
• Building aspects with POJOs and XML schema-based configuration

Constructing an Effective Data Access Tier with Spring

Simplifying data access with JDBC templates

• Streamlining runaway code with JDBC templates
• Structuring queries and callbacks for maintainability

Abstracting the Data Access Layer

• Supporting the Data Access Object (DAO) pattern
• Achieving implementation independence with platform agnostic exceptions

Managing transactions

• Analysing Java EE transaction support
• Controlling transactions with the Spring transaction manager
• Declaring transaction policies with XML and annotations

Building a Web Tier with Spring MVC

Processing Web requests

• Analysing Spring Model View Controller (MVC) architecture
• Mapping requests to controllers with annotations
• Processing commands, form submissions and simple wizards
• Server-side validation

Rendering the response

• Resolving views with ViewResolvers
• Spring JSP support
• View technology alternatives with Velocity

Accessing enterprise services

• Performing code-free JNDI lookups
• Sending e-mail using mail templates
• Scheduling tasks using the Quartz scheduler

Persisting Objects with Hibernate

Integrating Hibernate

• Simplifying data access with O/R mapping
• Unravelling the Hibernate architecture
• Deploying and configuring Hibernate

Generating Hibernate applications

• Developing the persistent class
• Defining the Hibernate mapping rules
• Storing and retrieving Java objects

Handling Complex Object Relationships

The role of the Hibernate Session

• Establishing a thread-safe session object
• Defining object states: transient, persistent, detached

Mapping collections

• Persisting and retrieving collections
• Preserving collection order for data integrity

Strategies for building object associations

• Specifying one-to-many and many-to-many relationships
• Controlling the association life cycle

Effectively mapping inheritance relationships

• Applying class rules for inheritance
• Techniques for class-database mapping

Optimising Data Access

Applying Hibernate Query Language (HQL)

• Selecting and filtering queries
• Improving structure with named queries
• Augmenting HQL with native SQL
• Maximising Hibernate performance
• Accelerating data access via Hibernate cache

Integrating Spring and Hibernate

• Employing the Spring Hibernate template
• Configuring Hibernate resources in Spring