We have successfully covered all the major technologies and concepts of core Spring Framework in this chapter. We are now capable of developing robust, standalone Spring applications composed of loosely-coupled beans inside the powerful Spring IoC container. We know how to apply cross-cutting concerns transparently across different layers of an application using the very flexible pointcut expressions of Spring AOP. We can manipulate Spring beans using Spring Expression Language, which helps keep the code clean and highly maintainable. We learned how to maintain multiple environment-specific bean configurations and property files using bean definition profiles. Now, we are all set for professional Spring development.

The source code available with this chapter contains multiple Spring projects that demonstrate the different ways of configuring Spring as well as usage scenarios. The examples listed in this chapter have been extracted from them.

In the next chapter, we will explore Spring Web module, leveraging all that we learned in this chapter in a web-based environment. The topics we have learned in this chapter are going to be the foundation for all the advanced topics that will be covered in the following chapters.