Foreword
The origin of Spring Batch as an open source project goes back to the time when I joined a relatively new and small company called Interface21.[1] Many existing clients, and one big partner (Accenture), had repeatedly run into problems because the open source community lacked such a framework. Every IT project that needed offline processing found that they had to reinvent the basic features of deployment, processing patterns, and reliability. Then, and to this day, these are the unavoidable but necessary features of many environments across a wide range of industries.
1 Interface21 went on to rebrand itself as SpringSource (http://www.springsource.org) before becoming a division of VMware (http://www.vmware.com) in 2009.
Who should read this book? For sure anyone who wants to learn how to use Spring Batch from the ground up. Some knowledge of the Spring Framework and familiarity with Spring programming models and common practices are more or less mandatory, but these are common skills and easily obtained elsewhere. Spring Batch isn’t all that difficult to get started with once you have basic Spring knowledge. But the more you use a complex tool, the more you’ll find that it pays to understand its inner workings, and even seasoned practitioners of Spring Batch applications will find much of the book rewarding reading.
The content of the book is laid out in a way that’s very accessible for readers: get started in part 1; learn the basics with handy references for later in part 2; and then the rubber meets the road with more advanced topics in part 3. The highlights for me are the chapters on transactions and reliability in part 2 and the chapter on scalability and parallel processing in part 3. These are two topics that come up again and again with clients and on the online open community forum.
I’m very glad for two reasons that someone else decided to write this book. The first is selfish: it’s a lot of work. The second is on behalf of the readers: when the author of a framework writes a handbook for users, the temptation is to reveal all the secrets and inner workings of the implementation, which isn’t necessarily the best practical starting point for users. The authors of this book are well qualified and present Spring Batch from the point of view of an expert user, which is the optimum point of view for readers because the authors have come to this knowledge by solving the problems that readers also experience while learning to use the framework.
The authors of this book are good community citizens and can often be found educating or supporting other users and participating in discussions on the Spring Batch community forum[2] and issue tracker.[3] In fact, I warmly recommend these activities as learning tools and as companions to this book—there’s no better way to learn than to get your hands dirty, and to share your questions, problems, and experiences with others.
DAVE SYER
SPRING BATCH LEAD