Introducing Spring Batch This chapter covers Understanding batch applications in today's architectures Describing Spring Batch's main features Efficiently reading and writing data Implementing processing inside a job with Spring Batch Testing a Spring Batch job Batch applications are a challenge to write, and that's why Spring Batch was cre- ated: to make them easier to write but also faster, more robust, and reliable. What are batch applications? Batch applications process large amounts of data without human intervention. You'd opt to use batch applications to compute data for gen- erating monthly financial statements, calculating statistics, and indexing files. You're about to discover more about batch applications in this chapter. You'll see why their requirements--large volumes of data, performance, and robustness-- make them a challenge to implement correctly and efficiently. Once you under- stand the big picture, you'll be ready to meet Spring Batch and its main features: helping to efficiently process data with various types of technologies--databases, 3