[Springframework-developer] Where to start with Spring framework?

[Davor C. <dav...@ma...>]

I heard of Spring Framework on the Struts mailing list. So far I know that 
it should be a J2EE application framework which solves many Struts's (and 
some other frameworks') problems.

I've been reading this mailing list for the last two-three weeks and I'm 
interested in joining the development team (I have at least 15hrs/week of 
the 'developers time' for the next 2 months). I fetched the CVS 
sourcetree but I don't understand quite clearly where to start. 
Unfortunatelly, I don't have the book either (Amazon ships it within 3-5 
weeks and my local bookstore sold it out).

So the question is: is there some sample application or quickstart document 
or do I really need to read the book? Since I won't get my copy of the book 
for at least 5 weeks from now, how can I start with Spring? Are there some 
book excerpts available, which cover the framework's basics?

And when I'm already writing this, some remarks regarding recent 
discussions:

- you really need some 0.8 prerelease or something like that, just to help 
the people (like myself) to start. With early release you'll get the 
momentum, lots of bug fixes, suggestions etc (standard open source 
artifacts)
- jalopy is a really good tool, on my last job I forced the development 
team to use it (we used WSAD as well) and it really helped with 
readability. We were most satisfied with the members sorting and long 
statement splitting:

DbConnector.getConnection()
           .fetchResultSet()
           .toXml()
           .save()

I have a quite nice jalopy config file if you're interested in it, I could 
post it somewhere.

Regards,
Davor
-- 
dav...@ma...