Spring Framework Interview Questions

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What are the types of the transaction management Spring supports ?

Spring Framework supports:      Programmatic transaction management.      Declarative transaction management.

What are the benefits of the Spring Framework transaction management ?

The Spring Framework provides a consistent abstraction for transaction management that delivers the following benefits:      Provides a consistent programming model across different transaction APIs such as JTA, JDBC, Hibernate, JPA, and JDO.      Supports declarative transaction management.      Provides a simpler API for programmatic transaction management than a number of complex transaction APIs such as JTA.      Integrates very well with Spring's various data access abstractions.

Why most users of the Spring Framework choose declarative transaction management ?

Most users of the Spring Framework choose declarative transaction management because it is the option with the least impact on application code, and hence is most consistent with the ideals of a non-invasive lightweight container.

Explain the similarities and differences between EJB CMT and the Spring Framework's declarative transaction management ?

The basic approach is similar: it is possible to specify transaction behavior (or lack of it) down to individual method level. It is possible to make a setRollbackOnly() call within a transaction context if necessary. The differences are: Unlike EJB CMT, which is tied to JTA, the Spring Framework's declarative transaction management works in any environment. It can work with JDBC, JDO, Hibernate or other transactions under the covers, with configuration changes only. The Spring Framework enables declarative transaction management to be applied to any class, not merely special classes such as EJBs. The Spring Framework offers declarative rollback rules: this is a feature with no EJB equivalent. Both programmatic and declarative support for rollback rules is provided. The Spring Framework gives you an opportunity to customize transactional behavior, using AOP. With EJB CMT, you have no way to influence the container's transaction management other than setRollbackOnly(). The Spring Framework does not support propagation of transaction contexts across remote calls, as do high-end application servers.

When to use programmatic and declarative transaction management ?

Programmatic transaction management is usually a good idea only if you have a small number of transactional operations. On the other hand, if your application has numerous transactional operations, declarative transaction management is usually worthwhile. It keeps transaction management out of business logic, and is not difficult to configure.

Explain about the Spring DAO support ?

The Data Access Object (DAO) support in Spring is aimed at making it easy to work with data access technologies like JDBC, Hibernate or JDO in a consistent way. This allows one to switch between the persistence technologies fairly easily and it also allows one to code without worrying about catching exceptions that are specific to each technology.

What are the exceptions thrown by the Spring DAO classes ?

Spring DAO classes throw exceptions which are subclasses of DataAccessException(org.springframework.dao.DataAccessException).Spring provides a convenient translation from technology-specific exceptions like SQLException to its own exception class hierarchy with the DataAccessException as the root exception. These exceptions wrap the original exception.

What is SQLExceptionTranslator ?

SQLExceptionTranslator, is an interface to be implemented by classes that can translate between SQLExceptions and Spring's own data-access-strategy-agnostic org.springframework.dao.DataAccessException.

What are the differences between EJB and Spring ?

Feature EJB Spring Transaction management Must use a JTA transaction manager. Supports transactions that span remote method calls. Supports multiple transaction environments through its PlatformTransactionManager interface, including JTA, Hibernate, JDO, and JDBC. Does not natively support distributed transactions-it must be used with a JTA transaction manager. Declarative transaction support Can define transactions declaratively through the deployment descriptor. Can define transaction behavior per method or per class by using the wildcard character *. Cannot declaratively define rollback behavior-this must be done programmatically.            Can define transactions declaratively through the Spring configuration file or through class metadata.  Can define which methods to apply transaction behavior explicitly or by using regular expressions.  Can declaratively define rollback behavior per method and per exception type. Persistence Supports programmatic bean-managed persistence and declarative container managed persistence.    Provides a framework for integrating with several persistence technologies, including JDBC, Hibernate, JDO, and iBATIS. Declarative security Supports declarative security through users and roles. The management and implementation of users and roles is container specific. Declarative security is configured in the deployment descriptor.         No security implementation out-of-the box. Acegi, an open source security framework built on top of Spring, provides declarative security through the Spring configuration file or class metadata. Distributed computing Provides container-managed remote method calls.    Provides proxying for remote calls via RMI, JAX-RPC, and web services.

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