Why Spring Framework is Popular?

Spring Framework Features

Spring is a powerful lightweight Framework used for application development. In a broader way, you can say that a framework is a large structure using which you can solve many technical related problems. Therefore, you can say that Spring Framework is a very well-defined tool which supports several web applications using Java as a programming language.

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Before the launching of Framework in the IT Sector, the applications were developed using JEE standards, with these standards we can deploy an application on any JEE application server. But it had several problems such as:

• Code became very complicated as application progressed.
• Performance of the system got affected due to the heaviness of the applications.
• The look-up problem of the component.

These problems were solved with the introduction of Spring Framework. The Spring Framework became prominent in the market due to basic Spring Framework features which are its modularity. That is, it can be divided into different modules each serving their own functionality.

These Spring Framework features are as follow

i. Lightweight

The Spring Framework is very lightweight with respect to its size and functionality. It is due to its POJO implementation which doesn’t force to inherit any class or implement any interfaces.

ii. Aspect Oriented Programming(AOP)

It is an important part of Spring Framework. Aspect Oriented Programming is used for separating cross-cutting concerns (for example logging, security etc.) from the business logic of the application. In the coming articles, you will be learning about it in much detail.

iii. Transaction Management

It is used to unify several transaction management APIs and is used to coordinate transactions for Java objects. Also, it is not tied to the J2EE environment and is used with containerless environments.

iv. Container

The Spring Framework designs and manages the lifecycle and configurations of application objects.

v. Dependency Injection

This feature of Spring Framework allows you to develop loosely coupled applications. Therefore, the unit testing of these loosely coupled applications becomes easier. This also allows the developer to swap out some of the modules according to its need.

vi. Integration with other frameworks

A great thing about this framework is that it doesn’t try to solve the problems have already solved. It just tries to integrate them with its framework which provides a solution to greater problems. Example IBATIS, Hibernate, Toplink etc.

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Features of Spring 5.0

Now major enhancements are done since the introduction of Spring Framework by Rod Johnson in 2003. Several versions have been released after its first. As of now the Spring Framework 5.0x versions are released in the market. So, let’s run down to the major upgraded features and enhancements of Spring 5.0 with Java 8 as a minimum requirement across all coding bases with the compatibility of JDK 9 at runtime as well as for build and test suit:

a. JDK 8 plus 9 and Java EE 7 Baseline

The Spring Framework codebase is based on code level of Java Programming 8. This code level provides readability using inferred generics and the conditional support for Java 8 is directly provided in the code. Now Java EE 7 API level is required in Spring modules along with Servlet 3.1, JMS2.0, JPA2.1, Bean validation1.1. Recent servers such as Jetty 9.3+, Tomcat 8.5+, WildFly10+ have been added to Spring 5.0. The compatibility of JDK 9 has been added at runtime as well as for build and test suit.

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b. Removal of Classes, Methods, and Packages

The Package mock.staticmock has been removed from Spring module along with the support for AnnotationDrivenStaticEntityMockingControl. The minimum requirement is Tiles3 and Hibernate5 which means packages web.view.tiles2 and orm.hibernate3/orm.hibernate4 drop. Spring 5.0 have also withdrawn its support for Portlet, Velocity, XMLBeans, Guava, JDO and JasperReports. Therefore, those who need them to work is recommended to be on Spring Framework 4.3.x . Many of deprecated methods and classes have been removed with some compromises for commonly used methods in Spring ecosystem.

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