Last night proved to be a great time, with a Java meetup here in Singapore once again brilliantly organized by Christopher Marsh-Bourdon. The event was held at Brewerkz and us Java geeks were on the receiving end of a great overview of the many facets of the Spring Framework from one Ben Alex, of Interface 21 and Acegi/Spring Security fame.

It was great to have a chance to chat with Ben a bit about Spring, open source companies, and different approaches that companies seem to take in building APIs and interacting with developers and users of said APIs.

My first experience with Spring was on a somewhat large personal project that I started working on about a year ago. Code that hasn’t seen the light of day in the real world, but has been a phenomenal learning experience as far as working with Spring, Acegi, as well as the Spring HibernateTemplate support, Spring MVC – and a bunch of other stuff that I just can’t remember.

If any of you out there have the attitude that I used to have, which was something like:

“Why do I need to use Spring, it’s just another framework, and all it does is manage other frameworks.”

I highly recommend that you download Spring right now, and use it. You won’t be disappointed. It’s worth the download and integration for the IoC and Dependency Injection alone.