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By Mikhail Garber, JavaWorld.com, 10/31/05

As enterprise computing enters the brave new world of service-oriented architecture (SOA), it becomes more and more important to seek new ways to describe, publish, and discover your services. The Web services-based approach does not offer automatic service discovery and often is too complex. New, lightweight development frameworks warrant new, lightweight approaches to service publishing.

Over the past several years, the Spring Framework has emerged as the de facto standard for developing simple, flexible, easy-to-configure J2EE applications. At the heart of Spring lies the Inversion of Control (IoC) principle. According to IoC, an application must be developed as a set of simple JavaBeans (or plain-old Java objects—POJOs), with a a lightweight IoC container wiring them together and setting the dependencies.

In Spring's case, the container is configured via a set of bean definitions, typically captured in XML context files:

 <bean id="MyServiceBean" class="mypackage.MyServiceImpl">
   <property name="otherService" ref="OtherServiceBean"/>
</bean> 

Then, when the client code needs to use MyService, as defined in this Spring context, you do something like:

 MyServiceInterface service = (MyServiceInterface)context.getBean("MyServiceBean");
service.doSomething(); 

In addition to IoC, Spring provides literally hundreds of other services, coding conveniences, and "hooks" into standard APIs that ease the development of a modern Java server-side application. Whether your application uses heavy-lifting J2EE APIs such as Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), Java Message Service (JMS), or Java Management Extensions (JMX), or utilizes one of the popular Model-View-Controller frameworks for building a Web interface, Spring offers you something to simplify your development efforts.

As the Spring Framework matures, more and more people are using it as a foundation for their large-scale enterprise projects. Spring has passed the test of development scalability and can be used as sort of "component glue" to put together complex distributed systems.

Any nontrivial enterprise application combines many diverse components: gateways to legacy and enterprise resource planning systems, third-party systems, Web/presentation/persistence tiers, etc. It is not unusual for an e-commerce site that began as a simple Web application to eventually grow to contain hundreds of subapplications and subsystems, and face a situation where the complexity starts inhibiting further growth. Often the solution is to break the monolithic application into a few coarsely-grained services and release them on the network.

Whether your application was designed as an integration point for dispersed services or has morphed into one, the task of managing all distributed components and their configuration quickly becomes a time-consuming and expensive one. If your application components are developed using Spring, you can use Spring remoting to expose your Spring-managed beans to remote clients via a multitude of protocols. Using Spring, making your application distributed is as simple as making a few changes in your Spring context files.