Spring Modules

The Spring framework comprises of many modules such as core, beans, context, expression language, AOP, Aspects, Instrumentation, JDBC, ORM, OXM, JMS, Transaction, Web, Servlet, Struts etc. These modules are grouped into Test, Core Container, AOP, Aspects, Instrumentation, Data Access / Integration, Web (MVC / Remoting) as displayed in the following diagram.

Test

This layer provides support of testing with JUnit and TestNG.

Spring Core Container

The Spring Core container contains core, beans, context and expression language (EL) modules.

Core and Beans

These modules provide IOC and Dependency Injection features.

Context

This module supports internationalization (I18N), EJB, JMS, Basic Remoting.

Expression Language

It is an extension to the EL defined in JSP. It provides support to setting and getting property values, method invocation, accessing collections and indexers, named variables, logical and arithmetic operators, retrieval of objects by name etc.

AOP, Aspects and Instrumentation

These modules support aspect oriented programming implementation where you can use Advices, Pointcuts etc. to decouple the code.

The aspects module provides support to integration with AspectJ.

The instrumentation module provides support to class instrumentation and classloader implementations.

Data Access / Integration

This group comprises of JDBC, ORM, OXM, JMS and Transaction modules. These modules basically provide support to interact with the database.

Web

This group comprises of Web, Web-Servlet, Web-Struts and Web-Portlet. These modules provide support to create web application.