why spring core jar divided into 5 jars for version 3?

[sivaprasadreddy.k]

Hi Guys,
I am now migrating my Spring2.5 project to Spring 3 version.
For a basic spring 3 application, just to define a bean in context.xml, we have to add the following 5 spring jars in addition to commons-logging.jar.

org.springframework.core-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar,
org.springframework.context-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar,
org.springframework.beans-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar,
org.springframework.asm-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar,
org.springframework.expression-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar.

It makes sense to me to separate out dao, orm etc supporting jars from core.
But why the core jar is again broken down into 5 jars?

[jamescarr99]

To give you an initial headache. At least it did for me.

My best guess though is there might be certain cases where you only need a small subset of functionality. A good example might be a library that is shared that just builds custom spring bean definitions but doesn't actually need a full context.

[Enrico Pizzi]

there might be certain cases where you only need a small subset of functionality

that's correct. I'll add that you can completely spare the "headache" by using Maven to manage your dependencies.

[sivaprasadreddy.k]

Hi,
Theoretically I agree with "If needed subset of functionality" thing.
But i couldn't imagine a practical situation where it needs only one of that jar. If anyone can give a practical example for that need that would be great.

[jason.chen]

probably part of the reason is for the OSGi.