Spring Batch Overview

Spring batch is a module for Spring that provides the capability to use Spring's dependency injection feature in a batch-processing environment - through tasklets, modeling the functionality COBOL's brought to high-volume computing for decades.Despite the growing momentum behind SOA and real-time integration, many interfaces are still flat file-based, and therefore, best processed through a batch mode. Nevertheless, there is no industry-standard or even de facto standard approach to Java-based batch architectures. Although there are the occasional articles on Java batch architectures, they are rare and far between. Batch processing seems to be a critical, missing architectural style and capability in the marketplace. Also consider that:

• Despite the growth of SOA, there is still demand for a high volume batch architecture that automates complex processing of large volumes of data and/or transactions most efficiently processed without user interaction.
• Batch jobs are part of most IT projects and there is currently no commercial or open source java framework that provides a robust, enterprise-scale solution/framework.
• Lack of a standard architecture has resulted in the proliferation of expensive one-off, in-house custom architectures.
• Batch processing is used to process billions of transactions everyday within mission-critical enterprise applications.

Despite the lack of standard architectures for batch there are decades worth of experience in building high-performance batch solutions. Spring Batch has been started with the idea and focus to consolidate this thinking into an open source project that can be offered as a hopeful de facto standard within the Java community. The same architecture principles that have made Spring so popular are as enriching to batch architectures as they are to online, SOA and any other Java