I recently had started to look into Spring Framework 2.5.
but as i have gone through its library i would prefer to say it as work flow rather than a framework. It is more like a loosely coupled several small frameworks put together . The beauty of Springs is you can pick up any of these framework & apply it at the desired layer in your web application.
Spring as a whole have many modules for Spring Batch ,IOC, AOP, Web MVC etc. It is very loosely coupled in such a way you can pick any of them and use in your application. You can check the complete modules at http://www.springframework.org/ . Spring MVC is industry's famous Model-View-Controller implementation for developing web based application.
Since Spring is a light weight framework, you don't require any app server.
A simple web server (that has servlet engine) is enough.
Its library is composed of classes & interfaces that either implement or extends the core java classes . So any programmer familiar with java will find it easy to understand . Spring can be easily be integrated into any web application having its business logic implemented in POJOs. Apart from that Spring provides an excellent test suite. There are several support classes that provide structure for implementing test classes. eg: DaoSupport class in DAO pkg. etc.
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Springs : As I touched
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To avoid confusion between beginners i want to say that a spring applications can be developed in any java compatible IDE.
Few popular IDE are Eclipse 3.3 , NetBeans 5.x or 6.x , Spring IDE .
I chose Netbeans 6.1 ver for it but i realized that its better for beginners to get start with Netbeans 6.0 as 6.1 is more strict & provides many features .
To avoid hasslement in choosing servers its better to use server embedded in IDE.
I simply had gone through steps given in the following link.
http://static.springframework.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/reference/mvc.html
An excellent guidance for making spring MVC application is given there .
But before making any web application i would recommend beginners to go through
http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=IntrotoSpring25 for better understanding.
