Spring 3 MVC and JPA

Hi everyone, I'm new in this forum.

I want to start learning Spring MVC and JPA (with hibernate as the vendor), so I have this idea for a small learning project. But I'm really having a hard time setting up a project on eclipse because of all the XMLs configuration files, I couldn't get past displaying a simple JSP file and it always failed when I tried more complex stuff like accessing the database.

I wanted to ask if there's a simple tutorial on how to setup a Spring 3 MVC web project, while the the entities are in a separate JPA project. I couldn't come up with anything across the web, so I'd really appreciate your help.

Thanks in advance!

Three options.

1) get Spring In Action Book
2) Read the documentation on Spring on the Springframework.org website
3) Still do #1 or #2 and try out Spring Roo.

However, #3 for learning doesn't help much since it does most of the work for you.

Mark