Spring Framework Interview Questions And Answers - DoAnswers.com

Spring is a layered Java/J2EE application framework, based on code published in Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development by Rod Johnson (Wrox, 2002).

Spring includes:

1. The most complete lightweight container, providing centralized, automated configuration and wiring of your application objects. The container is non-invasive, capable of assembling a complex system from a set of loosely-coupled components (POJOs) in a consistent and transparent fashion. The container brings agility and leverage, and improves application testability and scalability by allowing software components to be first developed and tested in isolation, then scaled up for deployment in any environment (J2SE or J2EE).

2. A common abstraction layer for transaction management, allowing for pluggable transaction managers, and making it easy to demarcate transactions without dealing with low-level issues. Generic strategies for JTA and a single JDBC DataSource are included. In contrast to plain JTA or EJB CMT, Spring's transaction support is not tied to J2EE environments.

3. A JDBC abstraction layer that offers a meaningful exception hierarchy (no more pulling vendor codes out of SQLException), simplifies error handling, and greatly reduces the amount of code you'll need to write. You'll never need to write another finally block to use JDBC again. The JDBC-oriented exceptions comply to Spring's generic DAO exception hierarchy.

4. Integration with Toplink, Hibernate, JDO, and iBATIS SQL Maps: in terms of resource holders, DAO implementation support, and transaction strategies. First-class Hibernate support with lots of IoC convenience features, addressing many typical Hibernate integration issues. All of these comply to Spring's generic transaction and DAO exception hierarchies.

5. AOP functionality, fully integrated into Spring configuration management. You can AOP-enable any object managed by Spring, adding aspects such as declarative transaction management. With Spring, you can have declarative transaction management without EJB... even without JTA, if you're using a single database in Tomcat or another web container without JTA support.

6. A flexible MVC web application framework, built on core Spring functionality. This framework is highly configurable via strategy interfaces, and accommodates multiple view technologies like JSP, Velocity, Tiles, iText, and POI. Note that a Spring middle tier can easily be combined with a web tier based on any other web MVC framework, like Struts, WebWork, or Tapestry.

You can use all of Spring's functionality in any J2EE server, and most of it also in non-managed environments. A central focus of Spring is to allow for reusable business and data access objects that are not tied to specific J2EE services. Such objects can be reused across J2EE environments (web or EJB), standalone applications, test environments, etc without any hassle.

Spring's layered architecture gives you a lot of flexibility. All its functionality builds on lower levels. So you can e.g. use the JavaBeans configuration management without using the MVC framework or AOP support. But if you use the web MVC framework or AOP support, you'll find they build on the configuration framework, so you can apply your knowledge about it immediately.

BeanFactory has many implementations in Spring. But one of the most useful one is org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.XmlBeanFactory, which loads its beans based on the definitions contained in an XML file. To create an XmlBeanFactory, pass a java.io.InputStream to the constructor. The InputStream will provide the XML to the factory. For example, the following code snippet uses a java.io.FileInputStream to provide a bean definition XML file to XmlBeanFactory.

BeanFactory factory = new XmlBeanFactory(new FileInputStream("beans.xml"));

To retrieve the bean from a BeanFactory, call the getBean() method by passing the name of the bean you want to retrieve.

MyBean myBean = (MyBean) factory.getBean("myBean");

The spring�??s DAO class does not throw any technology related exceptions such as SQLException. They throw exceptions which are subclasses of DataAccessException.

If the user what to update more than one row at a shot then he can go for BatchPreparedStatementSetter. This interface provides two methods

setValues(PreparedStatement ps, int i) throws SQLException;

int getBatchSize();

The getBatchSize() tells the JdbcTemplate class how many statements to create. And this also determines how many times setValues() will be called.

PreparedStatementCreator is one of the most common used interfaces for writing data to database. The interface has one method createPreparedStatement().

PreparedStatement createPreparedStatement(Connection conn)
throws SQLException;

When this interface is implemented, we should create and return a PreparedStatement from the Connection argument, and the exception handling is automatically taken care off. When this interface is implemented, another interface SqlProvider is also implemented which has a method called getSql() which is used to provide sql strings to JdbcTemplate.

In order to navigate through the records we generally go for ResultSet. But spring provides an interface that handles this entire burden and leaves the user to decide what to do with each row. The interface provided by spring is RowCallbackHandler. There is a method processRow() which needs to be implemented so that it is applicable for each and everyrow.

void processRow(java.sql.ResultSet rs);

The Data Access Object (DAO) support in Spring is aimed at making it easy to work with data access technologies like JDBC, Hibernate or JDO in a consistent way. This allows one to switch between the persistence technologies fairly easily and it also allows one to code without worrying about catching exceptions that are specific to each technology.

The spring container finds the bean's definition from the XML file and instantiates the bean.
Using the dependency injection, spring populates all of the properties as specified in the bean definition.
If the bean implements the BeanNameAware interface, the factory calls setBeanName() passing the bean's ID.
If the bean implements the BeanFactoryAware interface, the factory calls setBeanFactory(), passing an instance of itself.
If there are any BeanPostProcessors associated with the bean, their post- ProcessBeforeInitialization() methods will be called.
If an init-method is specified for the bean, it will be called.
Finally, if there are any BeanPostProcessors associated with the bean, their postProcessAfterInitialization() methods will be called

48. Explain the similarities and differences between EJB CMT and the Spring Framework's declarative transaction management ?

The basic approach is similar: it is possible to specify transaction behavior (or lack of it) down to individual method level. It is
possible to make a setRollbackOnly() call within a transaction context if necessary.

The differences are:

Unlike EJB CMT, which is tied to JTA, the Spring Framework's declarative transaction management works in any environment. It can work with JDBC, JDO, Hibernate or other transactions under the covers, with configuration changes only.
The Spring Framework enables declarative transaction management to be applied to any class, not merely special classes such as EJBs.
The Spring Framework offers declarative rollback rules: this is a feature with no EJB equivalent. Both programmatic and declarative support for rollback rules is provided.
The Spring Framework gives you an opportunity to customize transactional behavior, using AOP. With EJB CMT, you have no way to influence the container's transaction management other than setRollbackOnly().
The Spring Framework does not support propagation of transaction contexts across remote calls, as do high-end application servers.