Spring Starter Guide for getting the spring framework

Before you start the spring coding, you must first get the code for spring. There are two ways to get code: Download the packaged release package from the spring Web site, or check out the code from the spring's CVS warehouse.

Download Standard Release Package

Spring is developed with the help of the SourceForge platform, with the address www.sourceforge.net/projects/springframework. Visit this page to download the latest version of spring (when writing this book, the version number is 1.1, 1.2.6,2005 is currently November 14). If you want to download an earlier version, click the files link at the top of the page to view all previous versions.

You will find that each version is provided in two forms since 1.0M4: one that contains all dependencies and the other does not. If you only intend to use a subset of spring's many components, you should probably download the version without dependencies, and then manually pick out the dependencies you need by using the knowledge presented later in the "Analyzing Spring Dependencies" section of this article. However, in general you will use spring in multiple projects, and you can easily get full dependencies with just an extra few minutes of download time. It is also noteworthy that the dependent packages that were packaged with spring were used to compile the publishing package (the Spring Publishing package), so you can determine that the versions of these dependencies match exactly.

Unless otherwise stated, when it comes to this series of sample applications, we assume that you have downloaded a full release package containing all dependencies, with version number 1.1.

Check out spring from CVS

Spring has been in constant development to implement a number of new features, such as JMX integration, which has been included in the new features of version 1.2. If you want to master the new features before they are released, the best way to achieve this is to get the latest code base (codebase) from CVS.

To check out the latest version of spring source code, you need to install CVS first, download from www.cvshome.org, and then execute the following command:

Cvs-d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/springframework Login

When you are prompted to enter your password, simply tap Enter to provide a blank password. Then enter the following command to check out the head of the CVS warehouse, which contains the latest changes that have been submitted:

Cvs-d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/springframework Co Spring

The source code obtained by the above command is absolutely the latest version, containing two separate source trees: a main source containing spring, including all new features that are considered sufficiently stable to join the main tree, and the other is sandbox (sandbox) source code, Contains code that is still divided into development. The new code in the main tree may be added to the next version, while the code in the sandbox will not. Note that any new code can be changed without notice, and in view of this, you should avoid building new applications based on unpublished code.

Earlier versions of spring are also stored in CVS and tagged with their respective version numbers, so you can download directly from CVS to any version of spring. If you are unsure which tag to use, you can confirm it by browsing the CVS warehouse http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/springframework/online.