"If you follow the latest developer buzz then you've likely heard of IOC (Inversion of Control) containers and AOP (aspect-oriented programming). Like many developers, however, you may not see where these technologies fit into your development efforts. In this article, I'll begin to remedy that, with a hands-on introduction to using Hibernate and Spring to build a transactional persistence tier for your enterprise applications.
"Hibernate is a popular, easy-to-use, open source object-relation (OR) mapping framework for the Java platform. Spring is an AOP framework and IOC container. Together, these two technologies will provide the foundation of your development efforts in this article. You'll use Hibernate to map some persistent objects to a relational database and Spring to make Hibernate easier to use and provide declarative transaction support. As an added bonus, I'll throw in a little TDD (test-driven development), as DbUnit was used to write the test code for the example classes.
"Note that this article assumes that you are familiar with enterprise development on the Java platform, including JDBC, OR mapping issues, J2EE design patterns like DAO, and declarative transaction support such as that provided by Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technology. You are not expected to be an expert in any of these technologies in order to follow the discussion, nor do you need to be familiar with AOP, IOC, or TDD, as all three will be introduced in the article..."
