Part III. Core Technologies
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# Part III. Core Technologies

This part of the reference documentation covers all of those technologies that are absolutely integral to the Spring Framework.

Foremost amongst these is the Spring Framework's Inversion of Control (IoC) container. A thorough treatment of the Spring Framework's IoC container is closely followed by comprehensive coverage of Spring's Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) technologies. The Spring Framework has its own AOP framework, which is conceptually easy to understand, and which successfully addresses the 80% sweet spot of AOP requirements in Java enterprise programming.

Coverage of Spring's integration with AspectJ (currently the richest - in terms of features - and certainly most mature AOP implementation in the Java enterprise space) is also provided.

Finally, the adoption of the test-driven-development (TDD) approach to software development is certainly advocated by the Spring team, and so coverage of Spring's support for integration testing is covered (alongside best practices for unit testing). The Spring team has found that the correct use of IoC certainly does make both unit and integration testing easier (in that the presence of setter methods and appropriate constructors on classes makes them easier to wire together in a test without having to set up service locator registries and suchlike)... the chapter dedicated solely to testing will hopefully convince you of this as well.

- Chapter 3, The IoC container

- Chapter 4, Resources

- Chapter 5, Validation, Data Binding, and Type Conversion

- Chapter 6, Spring Expression Language (SpEL)

- Chapter 7, Aspect Oriented Programming with Spring

- Chapter 8, Spring AOP APIs

- Chapter 9, Testing

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2. New Features and Enhancements in Spring 3.0 | Home | 3. The IoC container