Introducing Spring Framework is your hands-on guide to learning to build applications using the Spring Framework. The book uses a simple My Documents application that you will develop incrementally over the course of the book and covers: * How to programmatically configure the Spring container and beans * How to use annotations for dependency injection * How to use collections and custom types * How to customize and configure bean properties and bean lifecycle interfaces * How to handle metadata using XML, annotations, and the Groovy bean reader * How to use the new Spring Boot and Spring XD After reading this book, you will have all you need to start using the Spring Framework effectively.