Some of the benefits Spring can bring to a project:
- Spring can effectively organize your middle tier objects, whether or not you choose to use EJB. Spring takes care of plumbing that would be left up to you if you use only Struts or other frameworks geared to particular J2EE APIs.
- Spring can eliminate the proliferation of Singletons seen on many projects.
- Spring can eliminate the need to use a variety of custom properties file formats, by handling configuration in a consistent way throughout applications and projects. The use of Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection helps achieve this simplification.
- Spring can facilitate good programming practice by reducing the cost of programming to interfaces, rather than classes, almost to zero.
- Spring is designed so that applications built with it depend on as few of its APIs as possible. Most business objects in Spring applications have no dependency on Spring.
- Applications built using Spring are very easy to unit test.
- Spring can make the use of EJB an implementation choice, rather than the determinant of application architecture. You can choose to implement business interfaces as POJOs or local EJBs without affecting calling code.
- Spring helps you solve many problems without using EJB. Spring can provide an alternative to EJB that's appropriate for many applications. For example, Spring can use AOP to deliver declarative transaction management without using an EJB container; even without a JTA implementation, if you only need to work with a single database.
Spring is essentially a technology dedicated to enabling you to build applications using POJOs. This desirable goal requires a sophisticated framework, which conceals much complexity from the developer.
