News and Announcements  

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring 2.1 M1 has been released.  This is the first milestone release in the Spring 2.1 series, introducing major new features including annotation-based configuration, JCA-based message endpoint management, new "context" and "jms" XML configuration namespaces, and JDK 1.6 and Java EE 5 support.

 
See the associated press release for an overview of the major themes of the 2.1 release. Subscribe to the Interface21 Team Blog for discussion and examples of the new features.

Please see the changelog and JIRA roadmap for more details on the exciting new features introduced in this release.

Enjoy, 

Juergen Hoeller
Lead, Spring Framework Development
Interface21 - http://www.interface21.com

Dear Spring community,

We are pleased to announce the first release candidate of Spring LDAP 1.2, with a number of features and bug fixes. Only the most important are listed here. For a complete listing, please see the changelog. The release is available for download here.

• Implemented client-side transaction support for Spring LDAP. See reference documentation for further information (LDAP-29).
• Changed the exception hierarchy to be an unchecked mirror of the JNDI NamingException hierarchy (LDAP-4).
• Exceptions thrown by Spring LDAP are now always Serializable, regardless of whether the wrapped NamingException is (which is not always the case) (LDAP-14).
• Rewrote LdapEncoder.nameDecode() to solve problem with national characters and remove regular expression used in parsing, drastically improving Distinguished Name parsing performance as a bonus (LDAP-30).
• Upgraded to Spring 2.0.4 internally. Spring 1.2.x is still supported (LDAP-35, LDAP-51).

Note that a number of API-breaking changes have been made in this release, mainly package restructuring stuff. Consequently, this is NOT a drop-in replacement for Spring LDAP 1.1.2, though upgrading should not present all that much work. Please see the supplied upgrade guide for details.

The Spring LDAP Team

Today at JavaOne there is a presentation about a new Spring product: Spring Batch. There was a press release earlier this week, which has already generated quite a bit of interest.  The press release is attached to this story (click below on "attachment").

Spring Batch is an addition to the Spring Portfolio. It is a response to a gap in the open source software market for a tool that can provide reliable batch and bulk processing in an enterprise environment. It can be used as a low-level infrastructure tool to optimise high-volume pipeline processing - a bit like a transaction manager. Another part of the product is a container layer that provides a higher level approach to identify, trace, start, stop, pause or restart a job or job execution. Both layers are natural fits with the Spring programming model - batch application developers code their business logic, with no need to be aware of the deployment environment.  To find out more more go to http://www.springframework.org/spring-batch.  The first public milestone release (1.0-M2) will be announced at JavaOne and flagged also on the website as soon as it is available. The source code will be on sourceforge from the first release or possible just before.

Interface21 is pleased to offer a number of Spring Framework 2.0 and AOP training events in the upcoming period, delivered by the people who build and sustain the Spring Framework. For full details, please visit the main training information page. Here is a summary of some of the upcoming courses and venues:

• North America
• Core Spring: May 15th - 18th, Washington, DC (Downtown)
• Core Spring: May 22nd - 25th, Chicago, IL
• Core Spring: June 12th - 15th, Boston, MA (More seats added!)
• Core Spring: June 18th - 21st, San Francisco, CA
• Core Spring: June 18th - 21st, Minneapolis, MN
  
• Core Spring: July 10th - 13th, San Diego, CA
• Core Spring: July 17th - 20th, New York, NY
• Core Spring: July 24th - 27th, Denver, CO

• Europe
• Introduction to Spring: May 13th - 15th, Amsterdam, NL
• Core Spring: May 22nd - 25th, Istanbul, Turkey
• Core Spring: May 22nd - 25th, London, UK
• Core AOP: June 5th - 8th, London, UK
• Core Spring: June 12th - 15th, Zurich, Switzerland
• Core Spring: June 12th - 15th, London, UK
• Core Spring: June 26th - 29th, Frankfurt, Germany
• Core Spring: June 26th - 29th, Edinburgh, UK
• Core Spring: June 26th - 29th, Amsterdam, NL

• Australia/Asia/Other
• Core Spring: May 21st - 24th, Sydney, Australia
• Core Spring: June 18th - 21st, Melbourne, Australia

... plus others

Dear Spring community,

I'm pleased to announce that Spring JavaConfig (SJC) 1.0 M2 has been released.

Downloads | Docs (Html , PDF) | JavaDocs | Maven repository

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring 2.0.5 has been released.  This is is a bugfix and enhancement release in the Spring 2.0 series, addressing all issues reported since 2.0.4 and introducing further concurrency improvements. We recommend to upgrade to Spring 2.0.5 from all previous 2.0.x releases.

Please see the changelog and JIRA roadmap for all the details of the 63 issues addressed in this release.

Juergen Hoeller
Lead, Spring Framework Development
Interface21 - http://www.interface21.com

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring Web Flow 1.0.2 has been released.  This is a bugfix and enhancement release, addressing all bugs reported against the Spring Web Flow 1.0 series and significantly enhancing Spring Web Flow's support for users of Java Server Faces (JSF).  We recommend upgrading to this release from previous versions.

Spring Web Flow is a next generation Java web application controller framework.  The framework provides a powerful system for implementing navigation logic and managing application state consistently across a variety of environments.

New and Noteworthy in this Release

Spring Web Flow 1.0.2 is a solid, stable release that serves as a drop-in replacement for existing users and also contains several noteworthy enhancements.  Three of these enhancements are particularly worth noting in more detail:

Significantly enhanced JSF integration

Now when used as a JSF extension, Spring Web Flow provides:

• A NavigationHandler that brings the full power of the Web Flow navigation system to JSF developers.  This system allows for implementing dynamic navigation rules and solves the infamous back-button problem out-of-the-box.
• A state management system providing UI Components full access to beans managed in any of Web Flow's conversational data scopes, including "conversation", "flow", and "flash" scope.  These scopes complement JSF's default scopes and are particularly useful for interactive web applications that apply Ajax techniques using libraries such as Ajax4JSF.
• Native support for all major JSF view technologies.  With Spring Web Flow 1.0.2, views that participate in flows are standard JSF views whether they are built using JSP or Facelets.  Any JSF UI Component can now bind to beans managed in any of the conversational scopes seamlessley.

Please run and review the sellitem-jsf sample for a quick assessment of these enhancements in action.  They significantly improve the ease of using Spring Web Flow in a JSF environment, and are the start of a larger effort that will continue into the 1.1 release and beyond.

Expanded practical documentation

Complete walk-throughs of each of Spring Web Flow's sample applications are now provided in the reference manual.  These walk-throughs take you through the implementation of each sample, and explain best practices and design considerations along the way.   After downloading the release, see the 'Practical' chapter for how to get the sample applications running inside your IDE.

Spring IDE 2.0 integration

The upcoming 2.0 version of the Spring IDE Eclipse Plugin features a Graphical Web Flow Editor and XML Flow Definition Editor.  Beginning with Spring Web Flow 1.0.2, each of the sample applications has been Spring IDE 2.0 enabled, allowing you to easily assess these tools as they progress.  To evaluate Spring IDE 2.0 simply import the sample projects into Eclipse and install the latest version of the Spring IDE 2.0 plugin from the nightly update site.

Spring Web Flow 1.1 Road Map 

Work has begun on Spring Web Flow 1.1 in anticipation of a first release candidate becoming available at JavaOne.  Building on 1.0.2, this release will offer major new functionality including support for conversational persistence contexts, Acegi Security integration, unified EL integration, integrated Spring 2.0 custom scopes, enhanced support for Java-based flows, and support for flow composition and inheritance.

Special thanks to Jeremy Grelle, Rossen Stoyanchev, and Christian Dupuis for their major contributions to this release.  It is an exciting time to be a part of the Web Flow community!

Keith Donald - Interface21
Erwin Vervaet - Ervacon
Leads, Spring Web Flow Development 

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring 2.0.4 has been released.  This is a bugfix and enhancement release, addressing all reported bugs against the Spring 2.0 series and introducing significant performance improvements.  We recommend upgrading to Spring 2.0.4 from previous 2.0.x releases.

Regarding the performance improvements, repeated creation of Spring bean instances is up to 12 times faster in this release than previous versions of Spring 2.0. AspectJ-based weaving performance has also increased by a significant factor.

Please see the changelog and JIRA roadmap for all the details of the 77 issues addressed in this release.

Juergen Hoeller
Lead, Spring Framework Development
Interface21 - http://www.interface21.com

Dear Spring Community,

I am pleased to announce that Spring-OSGi 1.0 M1 has been released. Downloads | JavaDocs | Sample

First milestone, 1.0 M1 contains most of the functionality described by Spring-OSGi specification:

Interface21, the company behind the Spring Framework and the Spring family of products, was named a "Cool Vendor in Integration and Platforms, 2007" by Gartner.