Spring framework overview

Spring is a framework for developing Java™ applications. WebSphere® eXtreme Scale provides support to allow Spring to manage transactions and configure the clients and servers comprising your deployed in-memory data grid.

Spring cache provider

Spring Framework Version 3.1 introduced a new cache abstraction. With this new abstraction, you can transparently add caching to an existing Spring application. You can use WebSphere eXtreme Scale as the cache provider for the cache abstraction. For more information, see Configuring a Spring cache provider.

Spring managed native transactions

Spring provides container-managed transactions that are similar to a Java Platform, Enterprise Edition application server. However, the Spring mechanism can use different implementations. WebSphere eXtreme Scale provides transaction manager integration which allows Spring to manage the ObjectGrid transaction life cycles. For more information, see Managing transactions with Spring.

Spring managed extension beans and namespace support

Also, eXtreme Scale integrates with Spring to allow Spring-style beans defined for extension points or plug-ins. This feature provides more sophisticated configurations and more flexibility for configuring the extension points.

In addition to Spring managed extension beans, eXtreme Scale provides a Spring namespace called "objectgrid". Beans and built-in implementations are pre-defined in this namespace, which makes it easier for users to configure eXtreme Scale. See Spring extension beans and namespace support for more details on these topics and a sample of how to start an eXtreme Scale container server using Spring configurations.

Shard scope support

With the traditional style Spring configuration, an ObjectGrid bean can either be a singleton type or prototype type. ObjectGrid also supports a new scope called the "shard" scope. If a bean is defined as shard scope, then only one bean is created per shard. All requests for beans with an ID or IDs matching that bean definition in the same shard results in that one specific bean instance being returned by the Spring container.

The following example shows that a com.ibm.ws.objectgrid.jpa.plugins.JPAPropFactoryImpl bean is defined with scope set to shard. Therefore, only one instance of the JPAPropFactoryImpl class is created per shard.

<bean id="jpaPropFactory" class="com.ibm.ws.objectgrid.jpa.plugins.JPAPropFactoryImpl" scope="shard" />

Spring Web Flow

Spring Web Flow stores its session state in an HTTP session by default. If a web application uses eXtreme Scale for session management, then Spring automatically stores state with eXtreme Scale. Also, fault tolerance is enabled in the same manner as the session.

For more information, see HTTP session management.

Packaging

The eXtreme Scale Spring extensions are in the ogspring.jar file. This Java archive (JAR) file must be on the class path for Spring support to work. If a Java EE application that is running in a WebSphere Extended Deployment augmented WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment, put the spring.jar file and its associated files in the enterprise archive (EAR) modules. You must also place the ogspring.jar file in the same location.