Honest Review of Spring Integration Training

I have been using spring framework for a long time and wanted to explore the spring integration training as a enterprise integration option.

I recently attended the Spring Enterprise Integration Training in San Francisco and wanted to share my opinion with everyone about the training. This was a 4 day hands-on course that teaches how to use various Spring project in conjunction to integrate business applications. The training was provided by one of vmware certified vendor called “ExitCertified” in San Francisco.

The overall theme of the training is based on how various spring projects accomplish the Enterprise Application integration patterns described in this book.

The Training Material

Following Training Material was Provided By vmware

• Student Lab Manual (Hard Copy) – 150+ PAGE Step by step guide for lab exercise.
• 4GB USB Flash Drive Keychain – Contained Installer and all lab exercise zip files.
• Student Lecture Manual – Contains the Slides Shared in Lecture sessions. This could be little more handy if there was a index page to search for topics.
• Student Notebook – Empty notebook for taking free form notes.

Pr-requisites for the training

The training requires a prior knowledge of following

• Core Spring Concepts like Dependency injection, AOP should be already known.
• Hands on Java is required.
• Some jUnit and Mockito understanding for test driven development experience would help in labs.

Who should attend this training

• If you are evaluating ESB frameworks and want to explore the spring way for doing integration this may be a right training for you.
• If you have been using spring core framework for a while and want to get high level understanding of other spring projects and features.

The Lab Exercises

There were several lab exercise sessions in the training relating to each of the spring projects covered in training. Dedicated setup was provided for each student and exercises were well designed.

• All the labs are test driven with Junit test cases. – – –
• STS customized installer is set for you to quickly get started.
• Tomcat is used is a web container for all web related lab exercises.
• A case study of reward network was used for developing application for all lab exercises.
• Overall the exercises give a good picture of the enterprise problems and provides a clarity that how each spring project resolves those problem at high level.
• In my opinion, the lab exercises were little too complex, and could be made easier by choosing some simple case studies.
• Also, at times it felt that there was not enough time to really try out the code since it took too long to understand “what to be done” for the exercise.

Content Of the Training Lectures

Each of the sessions were focused on primarily talking about 4 Mechanism of integration, and how spring ecosystem achieves it. The whole training is based on the Enterprise Integration Patterns book

Following 4 approaches were discussed and corresponding spring frameworks approaches and related spring support were talked about.

• File Transfer – FTP/SFTP support of spring integration project was covered.
• Database Sharing – Spring JDBC support and NoSQL database support was discussed.
• Remoting – Spring support for RMI, HttpInvoker etc was discussed.
• Messaging – Spring support for JMS and AMQP was discussed.

Conclusion

In my opinion, the overall the training was delivered well however it was not really worth the money we paid for. May be my expectations were little too high for spring integrations project. It looked like I was getting a walk thru of dozens of different spring framework projects in one training. Nothing in depth was covered may be since they wanted to show off on all types tools supported by vmware (SpringSource) for enterprise integration. My recommendation for this training is attend it if its free or someone is ready to pay for you (client/company).