http://www.onjava.com/lpt/a/2856

Use it for a very flexible data access library: Imagine retrieving and updating data without ever thinking about connections, databases, commits, rollbacks, etc. Imagine having all of your SQL externalized into config files so that it stays out of your pure Java code. Imagine swapping your data sources between flat files, SQL, stored procedures, CICS transactions, etc. Imagine also not changing your client code a bit while you are doing this. Imagine transactional capability across multiple data access components. Aspire provides all of this in a very small package.