Spring architecture

The Spring framework is made up of seven well-defined modules (See image):



Spring is a container that contains and manages the life cycle and configuration of application objects. You can configure how your beans should be created and how they associate with each other

As you can see in the figure,all Spring modules are built on top of the core container. The core container defines how your beans are created,configured and managed

·     The core container,where you will find BeanFactory,the heart of any Spring-based application. BeanFactory is an implementation of the Factory pattern that applies IoC to separate your application configuration and dependency specifications from the actual application code

·     Application context module,where supplies many enterprise services such as e-mail,JNDI access,EJB integration,remoting,and scheduling. It also supports for internationalization (I18N) messages,application life cycle events,and validation

·     AOP module,supports for aspect-oriented programming. It enables us to interoperate between Spring and other AOP frameworks.

·    JDBC and DAO module,the layer to manage database accesses

·     O/R Mapping module,the layer provides hooks into several popular ORM frameworks,including Hibernate,JDO,iBATIS SQL Maps

·     Web module,builds on the application context module,providing a context that is appropriate for web-base applications.

·     MVC framework,Spring has its own a full-featured Model/View/Controller (MVC) for building web application.