This rule flags the presence of the Spring Framework in the project. In order to run Spring on WebSphere application server, you will need to make sure its configuration is correct for WebSphere. The application migration tool has two rules that detect the use of the Spring framework.

The minimum version of Spring Framework that runs on WebSphere Application Server V7.0 or higher should be Spring v2.5.5. Older versions of Spring will fail on WebSphere version 7.0 or higher because of defect SPR-4788: NPE in GenericTypeResolver when using Spring 2.5 on IBM JDK 1.6.

One rule is a Java rule that checks for the use of the package org.springframework in Java files. The second rule is an XML file rule that checks for Spring framework configuration. The XML rule looks for any of the following items:

• any XML file that has the root element of <beans> with a Spring beans DTD such as
  
  <!DOCTYPE beans PUBLIC "-//SPRING//DTD BEAN 2.0//EN"
  "http://www.springframework.org/dtd/spring-beans-2.0.dtd">
• any XML file that has the root element of <beans> with a Spring beans XML schema such as:
  
  <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
  http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd">
  

References to Spring are only flagged once per project. Even if you have both Java and XML Spring artifacts in your application, only one rule per project will have results. Moreover, only the first entry in a Java file that triggers the Java rule will be flagged, and all other entries that match the rule criteria will be skipped. Similarly, only the first entry in an XML file that triggers the XML rule will be flagged, and all other entries that match the rule criteria will be skipped.

For more informaiton on WebSphere Application Server traditional and Spring Framework, review Spring Framework and the related subtopics on that page.