One common criticism of my Spring to Java EE Migration article series (see part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4) is that the article uses an old version of Spring against a modern version of Java EE. There's a reason for that, since project using older versions of Spring are the most likely ones to be looking to migrate to a newer technology stack, be it a newer version of the Spring Framework, Java EE or something else.
Nevertheless, truth be told, I've been focusing on Java EE projects for the last few years, and the times I've used Spring have been when maintaining legacy applications that don't use modern versions of the Spring framework.
Trying to keep an open mind, I bought Just Spring by Madhusudhan Konda for my Kindle Fire. The book uses Spring 3.0, versus Spring 2.5 in my article series. I decided to go for this book since it is a quick read (just over 60 pages), I didn't want to have to go through a 300+ behemoth of a book just to see if my opinion of Spring was outdated.
Quite frankly, the book did little to change my opinion in the Java EE vs Spring debacle. Although annotations get a brief mention in Konda's book, most of the examples still use XML configuration, and the seemingly endless XML needed to do anything nontrivial in Spring is one of the main reasons I'm not a fan of the framework.
To learn more about Java EE development, please check out my own books, Java EE 6 with GlassFish 3 Application Server and Java EE 6 Development with NetBeans 7.
