New and Updated Spring Courses

One of our most popular course suites has received a major update, and even a new addition to the family. We're pleased today to announce the release of all four:

• Course 117. Introduction to Spring (2 days)
• Course 117A. Spring-MVC Web Applications (5 days)
• Course 117B. Java Persistence with Spring (3 days)
• Course 117C. Spring Web Flow (5 days)

Courses 117/A/B now cover Spring 2.5. Spring-2.0 material has been re-tested, and now is intermixed with new presentation and exercises in many intriguing new features of the framework, including:

• Component scanning and annotation processing -- the @Component, @Autowired, and related annotations
• The @RequestMapping family of annotations as an elegant replacement for some of the more lumbering features of the Spring-2.0 Controller hierarchy
• Spring support for the Java Persistence API, including injectable entity managers and transaction support

Course 117C is the new kid on the block, providing a full week of training that starts with an introduction to Spring and moves on to web development using the Spring Web Flow project. Web Flow offers an innovation vision of web applications and subsystems as "flows" -- sort of page flows and work flows rolled together ...

"Spring Web Flow" introduces this emerging web framework (which appears destined to become part of Spring 3.0), and then goes ahead and gets its hands dirty, exposing features and foibles both documented and otherwise. Example code for Web Flow is still fairly hard to find out in the wide world, but we've built plenty of case studies into this course, as well as simple illustrative applications that clarify concepts such as Web Flow scopes, their relationship to traditional Spring beans, custom converters and validators, subflows, and lifecycle listeners.

All four courses include workspace overlays for Eclipse Ganymede, with built-in projects that support the Spring IDE, including its Web Flow plugin.