Spring Framework

The Spring Framework (or Spring for short) is an open source application framework for the Java platform. The first version was written by Rod Johnson, who first released it with the publication of his book Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development (Wrox Press,October 2002). A port is available for the .NET Framework^[1]. The Spring 1.2.6 framework won a Jolt productivity award in 2006 ^[2].

Although the Spring Framework does not enforce any specific programming model, it has become popular in the Java community as an alternative, replacement, or even addition to the Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) model. By design, the framework offers a lot of freedom to Java developers yet provides well documented and easy-to-use solutions for common practices in the industry.

While the core features of the Spring Framework can be used by any Java application, there are many extensions and improvements for building web-based applications on top of the Java Enterprise platform. Spring is popular because of this, and is recognized by vendors as a strategically important framework. ^[3]

The framework was first released under the Apache 2.0 license in June 2003. The first milestone release, 1.0, was released in March 2004, with further milestone releases in September 2004 and March 2005. Current version is 2.5.5.

http://www.springframework.org/

Hibernate

Hibernate is a powerful, high performance object/relational persistence and query service. Hibernate lets you develop persistent classes following object-oriented idiom - including association, inheritance, polymorphism, composition, and collections. Hibernate allows you to express queries in its own portable SQL extension (HQL), as well as in native SQL, or with an object-oriented Criteria and Example API.

Unlike many other persistence solutions, Hibernate does not hide the power of SQL from you and guarantees that your investment in relational technology and knowledge is as valid as always. The LGPL open source license allows the use ofHibernate and NHibernate in open source and commercial projects.

Hibernate is a Professional Open Source project and a critical component of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS) suite of products. JBoss, a division of Red Hat, offers a range of 24x7 Professional Support, Consulting, and Training services to assist you withHibernate.

http://www.hibernate.org/

JavaServer Faces Technology Overview

JavaServer Faces technology includes:

• A set of APIs for representing UI components and managing their state, handling events and input validation, defining page navigation, and supporting internationalization and accessibility.
• A JavaServer Pages (JSP) custom tag library for expressing a JavaServer Faces interface within a JSP page.

 

Designed to be flexible, JavaServer Faces technology leverages existing, standard UI and web-tier concepts without limiting developers to a particular mark-up language, protocol, or client device. The UI component classes included with JavaServer Faces technology encapsulate the component functionality, not the client-specific presentation, thus enabling JavaServer Faces UI components to be rendered to various client devices. By combining the UI component functionality with custom renderers, which define rendering attributes for a specific UI component, developers can construct custom tags to a particular client device. As a convenience, JavaServer Faces technology provides a custom renderer and a JSP custom tag library for rendering to an HTML client, allowing developers of Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) applications to use JavaServer Faces technology in their applications.

 

Ease-of-use being the primary goal, the JavaServer Faces architecture clearly defines a separation between application logic and presentation while making it easy to connect the presentation layer to the application code. This design enables each member of a web application development team to focus on his or her piece of the development process, and it also provides a simple programming model to link the pieces together. For example, web page developers with no programming expertise can use JavaServer Faces UI component tags to link to application code from within a web page without writing any scripts.

 

Developed through the Java Community Process under JSR-127, JavaServer Faces technology establishes the standard for building server-side user interfaces. With the contributions of the expert group, the JavaServer Faces APIs are being designed so that they can be leveraged by tools that will make web application development even easier. Several respected tools vendors were members of the JSR-127 expert group, which developed the JavaServer Faces 1.0 specification. These vendors are committed to supporting the JavaServer Faces technology in their tools, thus promoting the adoption of the JavaServer Faces technology standard.