Book excerpt: This is a brilliantly practical work that lets the reader experience a real-world scalable agile enterprise Java-based application being built from the ground up using the latest Spring 2.x kit available. The open source agile lightweight Spring (meta) Framework 2.x is by far the leading innovative force and "lightning rod" that’s driving today’s Java industry. Spring has time and time again proven itself in real-world highly scalable enterprise settings such as banks and other financial institutions. This book is the only authoritative Spring 2 authored book, as it has been written by team members of Interface21, the group that lead the Spring Foundation and its growing community.