Core Spring Course

I'm attending a Core Spring Training Course this week, held and organized here in Iceland by my company. I have finally managed to persuade my superiors to invest into Spring training for all the employees of our department. The course is held by Arjen Poutsma, the developer behind Spring Web Services project.

While I have been developing applications with Spring Framework for past few years, I am finding the Core Spring training course very informative and helpful. Most of the material covered so far is familiar and well-known to me, apart from the more advanced usage of Spring AOP, which I haven't used much so far. That is definitely going to change, I am sure. Every topic is followed by a very well designed lab where the newly learned material can be exercised.

Things to cover in the next two days are Spring MVC and Web Flow, configuring Spring Security, Remoting with Spring Web Services, etc. I sure hope we'll be covering (soon to be released) Web Flow 2.0 - I promised to write more about it when we start adopting it in projects, but we have not reached that point yet (one of the reasons is the fact that Web Flow haven't reached final 2.0 version).

While I prefer figuring how things work by experimenting on my own, it will be great to get information about Web Flow first-hand through the presentations and lab work on the course. Which brings me to the point -the real advantage and real value of this course is the chance to talk in person to people behind the Spring Framework, hear their opinion on things and get some good tips and advices (especially advices on AOP advices). Labs are in fact designed with that in mind.

I will write more about Spring AOP and Web Flow in the following days, so stick around.