Spring Batch
May 17th, 2007 by HenThe last session I attended at JavaOne was on Spring Batch. It’s a joint venture between Accenture and Interface21 to create an Enterprise Batching framework. At first I was there out of interest so I could pass on information regarding it to a customer who had asked a Spring question while planning a batching system, but as they started to discuss the system I realized that I’ve also written a (very basic) batching system. So I’m very interested in seeing how a more generic one would be done.
The talk went well and was a small but packed room. I had to skip out at the end for a lunch appt, so missed the demos. Rod Johnson started and after an introduction introduced the Accenture guys, Scott Wintermute (internal framework boss) and Wayne Lund (senior architect). From their description it sounds like this is something that has come out of an Accenture project that the Spring guys have been involved with for the last year. The batching design is going to feel relatively similar to JDBCTemplate and the best diagram on show is hidden away in a poor quality version on the Spring Batch website, so here is an easy link. Green is what you would code, Blue is Spring Batch and Grey is Spring and beyond.
One of my first thoughts was ‘have they replicated Quartz?’, and looking at the diagram it doesn’t look like that. Spring have abstracted the scheduling and Batch uses this (Scheduler).
Generally I like the look of it. I’ve personally never felt an urge to use Spring Core with a website, but I do think it makes a lot of sense in a headless batch like system; so Spring Batch feels like a nice idea to me.
There’s a downside currently. Despite the announcement at JavaOne the source is not available yet. It’s still being tweaked and refactored before being released to the community; very frustrating but hopefully it’ll be on show soon, and said arrival will be mentioned on the forum question I’ve asked.