Spring users: seven reasons why you'll like Impala

Here are seven reasons why you'll like Impala if you like already Spring:

1. Spring encourages interface based programming. Impala takes this one step further: modules communicate with each other using interfaces, and interface implementations are contained within modules.
   
2. Modules help you to organise your code, and eliminate unnecessary cross-code and cross-bean dependencies. Modules provide a much simpler mechanism for identifying high level relationships between parts of an application than is possible using raw application context definition files and relationships between individual beans.


3. What's not to like? There's virtually nothing that you can do in Spring that you can't do in Impala in exactly the same way as you would do it in vanilla Spring. You can still use virtually any of the Spring APIs, any Spring feature, technique, configuration mechanism, etc., unmodified! There's no new API or language to learn. You don't need to throw away any best practices. If anything, Impala makes it easier to enforce best practices, because it strongly encourages modular applications with well defined interfaces (based on Java interfaces).
   
4. A small learning curve. To start benefiting from Impala, all you need to do is organise you project according to a well defined set of conventions, and to add a bean definition into the relevant Spring context files. Otherwise, everything is the same.
   
   Impala is not asking you to embrace a new programming model, set of APIs or even language. Simply leverage your Java and Spring knowledge, but to greater effect.
   
5. Spring is great for test driven development in that it helps you manage dependencies better. Impala takes this a step further. The interactive test runner makes writing integration tests - still a pain point with plain Spring development - really easy, hence encouraging test driven development at every level.
   
6. Tasks such as reloading configurations, updating application logic, refreshing logging configurations are simple with Impala. Impala leverages Spring's first class JMX support to simplify these tasks.
   
7. Impala defines a convention-based project structure which makes sense both in terms of productivity and enterprise Java development best practice.