OK, I had a break. After my tangent, I got a new job. It has been very busy at work, which has kept me from writing, and I have moved from working in Grails to working directly in a lot of different Spring, including Spring Security, Spring Integration, and something new for me, Spring Data JPA.
The Spring Data project makes it easier to integrate Spring projects with new data technologies. I have always heard it coupled with technologies like redis, Hadoop, and MongoDB. Each of the subprojects is fairly individual from each other, because each of these data technologies has a different way of doing business, but they bring standard Spring-isms like dependency injection and Template-based access. They also have a subproject to make JPA easier to use. Just about everyone knows what JPA is- the Sun-standardized way to perform Object Relational Mapping. Our project is using JPA to do the mappings and Hibernate as the Entity Provider.
