Spring in Action
Authors: Craig Walls, Ryan Breidenbach
Amazon info
For a long time I have heard of Spring and it was time to learn more. A few years back I started using Hibernate and was an instant convert. Since Hibernate and Spring were so often referenced together, I had similar expectations for Spring. But alas, no. I am sure that Spring is great for some folks, but I did not see any instant compelling appeal.
The book is well written, clear, and funny. But it really positions Spring as a better alternative to EJB 2.x. Since splinters in the eye are a better alternative to EJB 2.x, that isn't saying much. And as far as Inversion of Control, that seems to me to bring in the horrors of debugging configuration files for flexibility that may never be needed. Now, I am a big hater of over generalized architectures that can do anything, but which require configuration to do anything. Which may be why Ruby On Rails had the immediate appeal to me that Spring totally lacks - although the Ruby part was incomprehensible. Taken together, I am looking forward to learning about Grails, as Spring is not for me.
Recommended: Developers who are smarter than I, or pretty much, all developers :). Actually, this is a good intro to Spring and well worth checking out.