Topic 2
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Getting Started
Often the hardest part of coming to grips with any new development tool is knowing where to begin.
Typically, this problem is worse when the tool offers as many choices as Spring. Fortunately, getting
started with Spring isn't actually that hard if you know where to look first. In this chapter, we present you
with all the basic knowledge you need to get off to a flying start. Specifically, we will look at the following:
Obtaining Spring: The first logical step is to obtain or build the Spring JAR files. If
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you want to get up and running quickly with the standard Spring distribution,
simply download the latest Spring distribution from the Spring web site at
Spring developments, check out the latest version of the source code from
Spring's GitHub repository. If you use Maven for application development, you
can simply add the dependencies for Spring into the project's pom.xml (project
object model) file, and Maven will download the JAR files for you. Please refer to
the section "Spring Modules on the Maven Repository" for details.
Spring packaging options: Spring packaging is modular; it allows you to pick and
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choose which components you want to use in your application and to include
only those components when you are distributing your application.
Spring dependencies: The full distribution of Spring includes a voluminous set of
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dependencies, but in many cases, you need only a subset of these dependencies.
In this section, we look at which Spring features require which dependencies; this
information helps you reduce the size of your application to the absolute
minimum.
Spring samples: Spring comes with a large selection of sample applications that
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make ideal reference points for building your own applications. In this section,
we will take a look inside the sample applications to give you a feel for the
amount of sample code that is available. If you couple this with the sample
application you build during the course of this topic, you should have more than
enough of a codebase from which to start building your own applications.
Test suite and documentation: One of the things members of the Spring
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community are most proud of is their comprehensive test suite and
documentation set. Testing is a big part of what the team does. By using Clover
of test coverage and is constantly striving to push this percentage higher. The
documentation set provided with the standard distribution is also excellent.
Putting a spring into "Hello World!": All bad punning aside, we think the best way to
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get started with any new programming tool is to dive right in and write some code.
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