I’m in the process of skilling up on the spring framework used within the Websphere application server container. What I have amassed so far are a ton of links to various tutorials and developerWorks articles that answer a few questions:

1. What is Spring?
2. Why do I want to use it?
3. How do I use it?
4. How do I use it such that the WebSphere Container can manage connections to resources?
5. How do I control transactionality?

My links so far:

1. Using Spring and Hibernate with WebSphere Application Server
2. Enterprise Java Community: Introduction To The Spring Framework 2.5
3. The Spring Framework – Reference Documentation
   1. Chapter 11. Data access using JDBC
4. Asynchronous Messaging Made Easy With Spring JMS
5. The Spring Framework Forum
6. A Primer on Spring’s Data Access Object (DAO) Framework
7. ZK Spring DAO Example
8. Twelve Best Practices for Spring
9. Develop Spring applications for WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, Part 1: Spring MVC
10. Spring and WebSphere – fish and chips, or fish on a bike?

Luckily, my scenario is relatively straight forward, I get a message from a queue and then need to persist it into a database without any need for transformation.

I took a brief look at Spring JMS for the message listener, but the documentation confused me. There is an attribute that states how long Spring will wait for a message to arrive. In my case, I want it to behave like a listener “Stay up forever”. So I don’t understand if Spring can be used with activation specifications or not.

For a while, I got confused by the ‘DAO’ pattern. I kept thinking that it was the equivalent of a Process Server Business Object (ie just contains data) but it’s really more of “the object that controls serialization to the back end”. I’m also viewing Spring as a framework that initializes classes based on information contained in an XML file.

I find that it’s harder to understand the benefits of Spring when working inside the application server. WAS already has all of this abstraction contained via JNDI lookups.

Anyway, I’m still ramping up the Spring learning curve, so take anything I say about how it works with a huge grain of salt. I’m likelier to be wrong than right.