What is Spring Framework?

What you'd probably want in a web application with Spring -

• Spring MVC, which with 2.5+ allows you to use POJOs as Controller classes, meaning you don't have to extend from any particular framework (as in Struts or Spring pre-2.5). Controller classes are also dead simple to test thanks in part to dependency injection
• Spring integration with Hibernate, which does a good job of simplifying work with that ORM solution (for most cases)
• Using Spring for a web app enables you to use your Domain Objects at all levels of the application - the same classes that are mapped using Hibernate are the classes you use as "form beans." By nature, this will lead to a more robust domain model, in part because it's going to cut down on the number of classes.
• Spring form tags make it easier to create forms without much hassle.

In addition, Spring is HUGE - so there are a lot of other things you might be interested in using in a web app such as Spring AOP or Spring Security. But the four things listed above describe the common components of Spring that are used in a web app.

Spring is great for gluing instances of classes together. You know that your Hibernate classes are always going to need a datasource, Spring wires them together (and has an implementation of the datasource too).

Your data access objects will always need Hibernate access, Spring wires the Hibernate classes into your DAOs for you.

Additionally, Spring basically gives you solid configurations of a bunch of libraries, and in that, gives you guidance in what libs you should use.

Here are some of the screenshots:

http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=93