Alternative data persistence approaches are all the rage these days. Transitioning our skill sets and legacy applications to these new and promising technologies though can be problematic. Spring Data is an exciting solution to persistence proliferation. It brings the flexibility and familiarity of the Spring Framework and adds the concepts of Repositories which allow developers to write their programs to using familiar methods such as save, update, delete, and dynamic finders.

In this presentation we will introduce Spring Data for GemFire and how it leverages your existing Spring Framework skills to create generic Spring style interfaces which will make it more efficient to transition to distributed data grids such as GemFire.

When applications grow bigger, modularity becomes a key aspect regarding maintainability. Design decisions made in the early days are hardly discoverable in the codebase, inter-module dependencies grow a lot. The talk introduces means and approaches to connect logical architecture to the codebase. Beyond that we discuss patterns and best practices around general code organization, package structures to build a solid foundation for Java applications and in how far Spring can help creating loosely coupled components and dedicated points to extend applications.