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Traditional Enterprise Application development is evolving rapidly to more light weight POJO based development. Spring is one of the leading technologies in this area and it continues to grow. More and more applications are being developed using Spring Framework. Spring not only offers a light weight development framework it also offers the following benefits and features.

• Spring Container which is light weight and can be deployed with out an application server. This allows applications to be developed without tying it down to Application Servers like Weblogic, WebSphere, Jboss …etc
• Separation of the configuration details from the actual code.
• Spring Framework offers many other components among them are AOP, security, spring core to mention a few. Configurations such as the following being out side of the actual code make it much easier to maintain and configure.
• Transaction Management
• Data Source and Connection Pooling
• Exception Handling
• Logging
• Messaging (JMS)

Aspect Oriented Programming is fast becoming popular and Spring Framework provides the ability to apply configurations like transaction management to the code through AOP. Transactions, Exception Handling, Logging, and Security being applied through AOP at runtime are a very convenient and fast way to build and configure applications. Imagine all these configurations in the actual code and how difficult it will be to change these.

Spring contains excellent hibernate and JDBC support and spring allows architects and developers to change there database access strategy depending on each use case. This is a tremendous advantage and these changes can be done with a proper design seamlessly. This kind of flexibility allows to better performance and quality applications.

Spring security, formally know as ACEGI provides RBAC facilities and authentication hooks for many authentication providers like LDAP, JAAS. Spring security can be applied through AOP and this makes this a powerful technique.

Exception handling and logging can be applied using AOP at different service boundaries. This allows a much cleaner code base and provides the ability to change the configuration files without compiling the application.

Spring will soon become an industry standard for application development. Ejb 3.0 and JPA are other light weight components but spring is far ahead of them. Using spring for enterprise application development is a good choice.

In my experience working with ISV’s, product development companies, and Software Service Providers I find that 90% of the time there is no well defined software development process. This leads to inefficiencies and it costs money and time to correct these inefficiencies. A well formed software development process is a key contributor to the success of the product and the company.

I believe that there is no one process fits all. A process needs to be customizable to fit the organizations product needs and also needs to be aligned with the marketing and sales strategy. The last thing you need to have is a process that becomes a bottleneck. A process that is not customizable and flexible is as good as not having a process.

Characteristics of a well formed process is to be flexible and should be able to be customized to suite the companies development and release strategy which should be aligned with the marketing and sales. I find that early stage software product companies do not invest time in formulating a well balanced process and I have seen over and over again this lead to inefficiencies and it costs time and money to the company to correct these later on.

Software service providers can benefit by having a well defined process to efficiently deliver high quality software services to their clients. A well defined process not only improves efficiency it also improves the overall quality of the final product or delivery.

I am a strong believer that a process should also contain industry best practises and conventions. These best practises and conventions will help the software development life cycle and also will produce higher quality software with less bugs in a short period of time. Investing on a well defined process will pay off in the long run.

I am a firm believer that the software industry can achieve the efficiencies of an automobile manufacturing company with a well defined process. I have seen true success stories where a well balance process has lead to better productivity and higher quality. Investing time and money on a process is critical and this can save time and money in the long run.

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