Technical Article

Christian Dupuis shows how the Pitchfork project developed by Interface21 and BEA allows you to run EJB 3 Session beans inside TomCat, including support for EJB 3 annotations such as @Interceptors and all the JEE 5 JSR-250 Common-Annotations for resource injection and the like.

In development scenario where you need to develop/run EJB 3 code, or use the JSR-250 Common-Annotations, you will now be able to take adavantage of Spring's significantly enhanced dependency injection and AOP capabilities as compared to those offered by the base JEE 5 / EJB 3 specs themselves.

Christian Dupuis takes a look at the recently released Spring 2.0 based support for key portions of the JEE 5 spec (JSR-220 common annotations as well as the interceptor capabilities of JSR-220). He tries the code in a BEA WebLogic Server Tech Preview version (this code will also be available standalone for use in any JSE environment).

Christian gives a glimpse of how a Spring based JEE 5 environment will offer much more power than basic JEE capabilities. As an example, he bypasses the weak interceptor capabilities of JEE 5, and uses full Spring AOP to apply an interceptor externally, and then uses an AspectJ based aspect.

Note that Christian is using the older (Spring 1.2) style BeanNameAutoProxyCreator mechanism to apply the Spring interceptor. Spring 2.0 does support the use of <aop:advisor> tags to apply Spring interceptors...
 

In Distributed Computing Made Easy, Jonas Bonér shows a transparent approach to distributing work to multiple worker nodes in a cluster. Spring is used to wire up and configure the system, while the TerraCotta Runtime for Spring is used to handle the actual load distribution, by clustering service invocations and even maintaining  normal pass by reference semantics for method invocations across the cluster.

Serge Tahé has written a set of 5 articles (in French) on Spring MVC, titled Spring MVC par l'exemple. The articles expose Spring MVC principles with examples for many of them and essentially amount to a 300 page course on Spring MVC.

Links are below:

http://tahe.developpez.com/java/springmvc-part1
http://tahe.developpez.com/java/springmvc-part2
http://tahe.developpez.com/java/springmvc-part3
http://tahe.developpez.com/java/springmvc-part4
http://tahe.developpez.com/java/springmvc-part5

Lingo is a lightweight POJO based remoting and messaging library based on Spring's Remoting which extends it to support JMS (and allows plugging in other transports). Lingo can support a wide range of message exchange patterns including both synchronous and asynchronous message exchange.

Lingo (Spring Remoting) : Passing client credentials to the server is a detailed blog entry by Sanjiv Jivan showing how to use Lingo with Acegi  to achieve POJO based remoting with Acegi remoting on top of JMS.

Vikram Veeravelu has written an article discussing the use of Spring JDBC over direct use of the JDBC API.  It's published on java.net and is a good introduction for anyone interested in trying the Spring JDBC library.

In LdapTemplate: LDAP Programming in Java Made Simple, Mattias Arthursson and Ulrik Sandberg write about the LdapTemplate library, which brings JdbcTemplate-like functionality to the world of LDAP.

Note that we expect that LdapTemplate will make its way into Spring itself in the near term. 

Develop Spring applications for IBM WebSphere Application Server -- Part 1, by Sunil Patil, is the first article of a three-part series from IBM developerWorks , which walks through developing a J2EE application for the WebSphere app server using Spring Framework and IBM's Rational Application Developer. This first article mostly focuses on Spring concepts such as the bean factory, AOP, and how to integrate Spring and Struts applications.

In POJO Aspects in Spring 2.0: A Simple Example, Mark Fisher describes some of the new AOP functionality in Spring 2.0, including the new <aop:xxx> XML namespace, and the use of aspects defined as POJOs (plain java objects).