Part 2. Core Spring Batch

Part 2 starts where part 1 left off. By now, you have a good understanding of what Spring Batch is capable of, so it’s time to exhaustively cover the framework.

Chapter 3 is about configuration: how to configure jobs, steps in jobs, listeners, and infrastructure components like the job repository. You can use this chapter as a reference for the XML syntax and the annotations you can use to configure Spring Batch. You can also use this chapter to discover every single piece of Spring Batch configuration.

Chapter 4 covers how to launch batch jobs. There are myriads of ways to launch batch jobs, depending on your requirements and the systems you’re working on. Chapter 4 shows how to launch Spring Batch jobs from the command line and from HTTP requests. It also shows you how to schedule the execution of jobs with the system scheduler cron and with a Java-based scheduler like Spring Scheduling. You’ll also see how to stop jobs properly.

Do you remember chunk-oriented processing? This is the way Spring Batch efficiently handles the classical read-process-write pattern in batch applications. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 thoroughly cover each phase of chunk-oriented processing.

Chapter 5 is about reading. You’ll learn how to configure ready-to-use components to read from different data sources: JDBC, JPA, and Hibernate; flat and XML files; and JMS queues.

Chapter 6 covers writing. Again, Spring Batch provides off-the-shelf components to write data to the most popular resources. Read this chapter to learn how to leverage batch updates to write to a database efficiently, send emails, and write to flat and XML files.

Chapter 7 covers the processing phase of a chunk-oriented step. This is where you can embed business logic to transform read items before they’re written and where you can avoid sending an item to the writing phase through validation and filtering.

Chapters 8 and 9 are about making your jobs more robust and reliable. Chapter 8 covers Spring Batch built-in features for bulletproofing jobs, like skip, retry, and restart on failure. Chapter 9 provides an in-depth presentation of transaction management in Spring Batch, as well as some transaction patterns you’ll definitely use in batch applications.