Questions to Determine Spring / Spring Security, etc Knowledge

Question

I requested Spring / Spring Security, etc training at work, and the bosses want to hire someone who knows Spring to come work with us as a consultant so that we'll learn Spring from a real-world perspective instead of a training perspective.

I've been tasked with coming up with questions of various difficulty to ask potential hires in order to ascertain their Spring ability. The problem is that I don't fully understand Spring yet (hence the training request).

What questions would you ask someone to determine their Spring ability, and what level of knowledge would someone have to have of Spring to answer them? (I need 2 "easy" questions, 2 "medium" questions and 2 "hard" questions, specifically, but I'll take anything you guys have).

Answer 1

Here an easy one : What is Dependency Injection ?

Answer 2

Easy: Spring originally arose as a reaction to what technology? How does its philosophy compare?

Easy: Describe a situation where you improved a project with Spring? Which parts of Spring did you use?

Medium: Describe the facets of an application for which Spring supplies a solution. (looking for: dependency injection, transactions, distributed computing, etc)

Answer 3

I suggest to hire someone who is a 'SpringSource Certified Spring Professional' if you can do that or at least someone who has completed the 'Core Spring' course.

As for the questions, there are some easy/medium sample questions (with answers) on the certificate page.

During the interview I would ask the candidate to explain some real-world situations where, how and why he/she has used Spring before.