In honor of Spring (both the framework, and the season), I've changed my weblog's stylesheet to be a springy-green.

Why honor the Spring Framework in such a way? Because, at my new company, I suggested its use (along with Velocity), even though I'd never used it profesionally. Why would I do that? Because Rod Johnson's book Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development (in which Johnson introduces the ideas and code that have become the Spring Framework) is such an excellent book that I became convinced that Spring is best-of-breed. Also, lurking on the mailing list proved to me that Spring is well-supported and has great traction with developers.

The result of choosing Spring is that the team has really become productive writing the new parts of our system, and it's helped us think about the system's architecture in better ways than before. The configuration infrastructure has allowed us to write better-decoupled components that can be wired up declaratively, or wired up programmatically and tested in isolation. There are so many good things about it that it's hard to cover them all.

Watch for the release of Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB from Rod Johnson, which I'm sure will be a great treatise on using Spring to create non-EJB-based solutions.