Rob Harrop

Jean,

Spring has a large array of remoting capabilities including but not limited to JAX-RPC. We have a full chapter on this in Pro Spring.

Rob

Exactly as Lasse pointed out - JCA support is coming. If you are not using JCA for legacy connectivity then the can still use Spring to wire together your application but you will need to interact with your legacy application manually.

Rob

I think no matter which Spring book you buy, you should certainly buy both of Rod's book. They give you the reasoning behind Spring and books like Pro Spring give you the 'how' with Spring.

Rob

To a certain degree you are correct - if you want failover then use a container that supports it. However, bear in mind that often the simplest way of doing failover is to use some kind of hardware clustering kit with Tomcat sat behind it.

I *think* that you can also achieve the same thing with Apache as the load balancer/fail-over manager.

Spring itself has no code to support application failover, but it will happily work alongside J2EE failover capabilities.

Rob

I guess the easiest way to answer this is that Spring does not mandate a usage pattern at all. You can replace many of the services you get with *EJB* using Spring outside of a container - that is pooling, security and transaction management.

If you need to use other J2EE services like JMS, XA transaction, JNDI or servlets then you are going to need to the appropriate container. Obviously, you don't need a full J2EE container. For instance, I often use just servlets and JMS, which translates to Tomcat and ActiveMQ.

Spring will work happily in both J2EE and J2SE settings.

Rob

Emman,

I use IntelliJ and it reallys helps because you get class completion in XML files.

Rob

Srikanth,

We talk about best practices throughout the book, but we also have a chapter (11) focused on middle tier design.

Rob

Pradeep,

The PicoContainer IoC capabilities are nowhere near as extensive as Springs. Spring is definitely the most complete and sophisticated IoC container on the Java market.

Rob

My thoughts on this topic are that Spring can in most cases replace EJBs altogether. However, if your application lends itself to distribution then EJBs are a good choice because they were originally designed for remote access. In this case, you can use Spring EJB support to back your EJBs with Spring services that are easier to test and manage.

This topic is covered in more detail in chapter 13 of Pro Spring.

Rob

Jean Louis,

Spring itself is not a transaction manager, however it does integrate with TMs via JTA. Essentially you get to define transaction declaratively and then decide whether they are local (JDBC, JMS) or distributed (XA).

Chapter 12 is dedicated to this topic and shows XA transactions in action with Oracle.

Rob

I agree with Lasse. Before getting into drag and drop, try out a code-based solution first. You can be very productive with Spring/Hibernate/JDO/Tapestry/JSF etc. You might want to look at Matt's AppFuse software as a way to get you started on Spring.

Rob

This is another of the topics that we didn't manage to cover in the book - but as Craig mentions there is very little to it and Spring's JavaDoc for DelegatingVariableResolver shows you all the steps you need to take.

Rob

The appendix is specifically targeted at the Spring IDE plugin for Eclipse.

Rob

Terry,

Wherever it is applicable yes we do. Typically this in the AOP stuff, where Spring has a lot interaction. In other areas, Spring is just a thin wrapper around other frameworks and adds negligible overhead to the application.

Rob

I guess there is not that much I can add to this discussion other than to say that both Pro Spring and Spring Live are excellent resources for people looking at Spring with/versus Struts.

Rob