I've been refreshing my skills on the lightweight Java stack (i.e. Spring/Hibernate/JUnit/JMock/AspectJ) recently, which has been really fun.

It's been a while since I built something significant in Java. 95% of the work I've been doing at Highwinds has been straight Flex, and during my management stint at CFI before I came to Highwinds I spent most of my time directing/architecting development efforts as opposed to getting my hands dirty. As a result, I left off from my last coding project with Spring just as 2.0 was coming out, which meant I missed out on all the bad-ass annotation support and could only look over developer's shoulders to see it in action.

Of course, nothing has changed in principle - the implementation just got simpler and better. I've spent the last week picking up the "how" of the Spring aspect-oriented support for... well, everything, and learning JMock.

I needed a quick reference to get moving, so to supplement the metric assload of online materials I picked up a copy of Spring Recipes by Gary Mak. It's an awesome quick reference/cookbook and was exactly what I needed to get going. After all, I knew what the framework could do, just needed something to boil down the config for me so I could put the principles to use.

So, here I am a week later with an almost-finished Java service app. Of all the features, I think the JMock and JUnit stuff is my favorite. There's nothing cooler than being able to test your stack on the way down as you code it without having even finished the components at the lower layers - love it. Annotation-based validation in OVal comes in second, and Hibernate config-by-domain-object-annotation comes in third.

LeGros was also showing me Grails this week, so that might be what I turn my attention to next...