Spring/Hibernate Training 4

RTFDTD

For an open source project, spring has pretty good documentation. Their reference manual is in both HTML and PDF format, and is updated frequently for new releases. But still, sometimes the reference manual lags behind the rather active development process, and it doesn't cover every last bit of information.

For xml context files, surprisingly, everything you want to know is in the DTD. The DTD covers every imaginable element and attribute, obviously; additionally, it has tons of useful comments sprinkled liberally in the file. Spring is probably unique in this aspect: other open source projects (e.g. Hibernate) tend to have sparsely populated DTDs.

So next time if someone asks you a spring question that you are too tired to answer, instead of saying "RTFM", you can say "RTFDTD".