Today VMware team released Micro Cloud Foundry, a complete, local version of the popular, open source Platform as a Service that lets developers run a full featured cloud on their Mac or PC. Using Micro Cloud Foundry developers can build end-to-end cloud applications locally, without the hassles of configuring middleware while preserving the choice of Read more…

Spring has rich support for transaction management through its PlatformTransactionManager interface and the hierarchy of implementations. Spring's transaction support provides a consistent interface for the transactional semantics of numerous APIs. Broadly, transactions can be split into two categories: local transactions and global transactions. Local transactions are those that affect only one transaction resource. Most often, Read more…

I looked at what a basic FactoryBean is in my previous post. While FactoryBeans are important – and knowing what they do can help you navigate the framework more effectively – they're by and large no longer the recommended approach to the task as of Spring 3.0 and the imminent Spring 3.1. The whole point Read more…

In this post, I'll look at Spring's org.springframework.beans.factory.FactoryBean<T> interface. The definition of this interface is: A FactoryBean is a pattern to encapsulate interesting object construction logic in a class. It might be used, for example, to encode the construction of a complex object graph in a reusable way. Often this is used to construct complex Read more…

Applications don't exist in a vacuum. They need to communicate with their customers and with other applications. Application Integration is all about enabling this communication. Integration lets applications share services and data with each other, and, just as often, integration helps applications connect with their users. Spring Integration provides a framework to build integration solutions, Read more…

In this post, we will introduce the core concepts of messaging, as well as the rich support for various types of messaging that the Spring framework and its sister projects provide. What is Messaging? To best explain this, I'll paraphrase the example offered by the groundbreaking Enterprise Integration Patterns book by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Read more…

Apache Maven is a popular open source tool that offers a convention-over-configuration approach to project build management. Indeed the Eclipse Community Surveys show Maven increased its adoption from 8% in 2009 to 28% in 2010, underscoring its usefulness in a wide range of project settings. Even though you can use Spring without using Maven, there Read more…

All applications stem from a domain model. The term "domain model" describes the nouns, or data, in a system that is important to the problem you're trying to solve. The service tier – where business logic lives – manipulates the application data and must ultimately persist it (typically, in a database). The explanation is simple, Read more…

The Spring framework emerged as a de-facto standard in 2003 and has been helping people build bigger, better applications with cleaner code ever since. In this post, we will discuss the options available to you for configuring an application using the Spring component model. We will grow a simple application from the simplest form and Read more…

There are many ways to skin a cat. Many applications today rely on messaging (AMQP, JMS) to bridge the gap between disparate systems and data. Others rely on RPC (typically web-services, or REST). For a great many applications, however, file transfer is very much a way of life! There are several common ways of supporting Read more…