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spring-net/doc/reference/src/preface.xml

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<chapter xml:id="preface" xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" version="5">
<title>Preface</title>
<para>Developing software applications is hard enough even with good tools
and technologies. Spring provides a light-weight solution for building
enterprise-ready applications. Spring provides a consistent and transparent
means to configure your application and integrate <link
linkend="aop-introduction-concepts">AOP</link> into your software. Highlights of
Spring's functionality are providing declarative transaction management for
your middle tier as well as a full-featured ASP.NET framework.</para>
<para>Spring could potentially be a one-stop-shop for many areas of
enterprise application development; however, Spring is modular, allowing you
to use just those parts of it that you need, without having to bring in the
rest. You can use just the IoC container to configure your application and
use traditional ADO.NET based data access code, but you could also choose to
use just the <link linkend="orm">Hibernate integration code</link>
or the <link linkend="ado-introduction">ADO.NET abstraction layer</link>.
Spring has been (and continues to be) designed to be non-intrusive, meaning
dependencies on the framework itself are generally none (or absolutely
minimal, depending on the area of use).</para>
<para>This document provides a reference guide to Spring's features. Since
this document is still to be considered very much work-in-progress, if you
have any requests or comments, please post them on the user mailing list or
on the support forums at <ulink
url="http://forum.springframework.net">forum.springframework.net</ulink>.</para>
<para>Before we go on, a few words of gratitude are due to Christian Bauer
(of the <ulink url="http://www.hibernate.org/">Hibernate</ulink> team), who
prepared and adapted the DocBook-XSL software in order to be able to create
Hibernate's reference guide, thus also allowing us to create this one. Also
thanks to Russell Healy for doing an extensive and valuable review of some
of the material.</para>
</chapter>