What is spring mate? Sorry for a noobish question but i've heard of it a lot.
Can you please elaborate on its usefulness from a career prospect?
Can you also please guide me to do some useful projects in java to improve the learning curve?
I'm well versed in core java too.
The Spring Framework is a lightweight solution and a potential one-stop-shop for building your enterprise-ready applications(It's a J2EE Framework, to be clear). However, Spring is modular, allowing you to use only those parts that you need, without having to bring in the rest. It has 7 layers and you can use only those you want.
Spring is designed to be non-intrusive, meaning that your domain logic code generally has no dependencies on the framework itself. [
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It can be integrated with Struts on top, and Spring as Business logic and i'm pretty sure, there is library for all your needs. For ex. If you want to implement FB Login in your app, just use spring-sociallib and you are ready to go.It contains methods to interact with FB,twitter,etc.
Overall, as said before, it is an One-Stop solution for Enterprise-ready applications.
The way to start learning is by reading those documents. Just read Spring MVC, as this is the basic for Web Apps. Get an idea on your own, simple yet logical, and start develop it with this. Add more modules over days to implement all 7 layers of Spring and other plugins.If you can touch even 4 layers, it is good.
As all companies move towards a robust,cost-effective, less-learning curve technology, they are either start developing with Spring or migrating from Struts-to-Spring. So from career POV also, this will help you a lot.