News and Announcements  

The Spring Experience 2005 kicked off tonight with a big bang.

In the post dinner keynote, Rod Johnson talked about Spring past, present and future. Spring 2.0 M1, with a number of compelling new features, was announced to be available in about 2-4 days.

Highlights of the keynote included:

•  An overview by Rod of the much more powerful AOP capabilities in Spring 2.0, including full support for AspectJ pointcut expressions for applying pointcuts. This is mostly the combined effort of Adrian Colyer (the AspectJ lead) and Rod Johnson. Other AOP enhancements include support for the @Aspect annotation for creating aspects out of plain Java classes, and the ability to use AspectJ to dependency inject any objects.
  
• A demonsration by Rob Harrop of the XML configuration enhancements he has implemented for Spring 2.0, effectively allowing custom domain specific dialects (described by XML Schema) to be created for XML configuration. Spring will ship out of the box with a number of variants for AOP and transaction config, among others.
• Alef Arendsen demonstrated that Spring 2.0 will be completely backwards compatible. He showed the Spring JPetstore sample (from the Spring 1.2.6 distribution) running in Geronimo. He then proceeded to overwrite the 1.2.6 spring.jar file with another version containing the code for Spring 2.0 M1, and showed that the app ran completely unchanged on redeployment, with no breakage. He then modified the XML configuration to use the new simplified XML config, and showed that again the application ran without breakage.
• Keith Donald demonstrated Spring WebFlow as used to implement a flight booking system in incremental fashion.
• Other new features mentioned included message driven POJOs, scoped bean support in the application context, CommonJ support, and the SimpleJdbcTemplate for simplified JdbcTemplate usage in a Java 5 environment.

We're pleased to announce that Spring 1.2.6 has just been released. This is a bugfix and minor enhancement release, fixing a number of issues found in previous 1.2.x releases and introducing various minor new features.

As always, for a full list of enhancements and fixes, please see the changelog.

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For anybody accessing CVS, note that CVS HEAD is now finally dedicated to Spring 2.0 development. A maintenance branch "mbranch-1-2" has been created for any future work in the 1.2.x line.

During the course of this week, we will move already prepared 2.0 features from the sandbox over to the main sources. Starting with this, the nightly snapshots will be 1.3 RC1 previews, already containing 1.3 features.

Interface21 is pleased to offer a number of Spring Framework training events in the upcoming period, delivered by core Spring Framework developers. For full details, please visit the main training information page. Here is a summary of the upcoming courses and venues:

• Core Spring: November 22nd - 25th, Amsterdam, NL
• Introduction to Spring: Nov. 30th - Dec. 2nd, Amsterdam, NL
• Core Spring: November 29th - December 2nd, Dallas, TX (discount extended!)
• Core Spring: November 29th - December 2nd, Edinburgh, UK (early-bird deadline is November 4th!)
• Core Spring: January 24th - 27th, Cork, Republic of Ireland

Interested in a full-course of Spring during Winter? The Spring Experience 2005 conference is taking place in sunny Bal Harbor Beach, Florida, from Dec. 7th-10th.

Spring: A Developer's Notebook is an introductory book to the Spring framework introducing the IoC container, Spring MVC, JDBC abstraction, AOP and transaction management. The first chapter is now available for download.

Interface21 is pleased to offer a number of Spring Framework training events in the upcoming period, taught by the same people who built Spring.

For full details, please visit the main training information page.

Here is a summary of the upcoming courses and venues:

• Core Spring: Oct. 11th-14th, Washington, DC
• Core Spring: Oct. 25th-28th, Oslo, Norway (early bird date is Sep. 16th!)
• Introduction to Spring: Nov. 7th-9th, Amsterdam, NL (early bird date is Oct. 7th!)
• Core Spring: Nov. 22nd-25th, Amsterdam, NL (early bird date is Oct. 28th!)
• Core Spring: Nov. 29th - Dec. 2nd, Dallas, TX (early bird date is Nov. 4th!)
• Core Spring: Nov. 29th - Dec. 2nd, Edinburgh, UK (early bird date is Nov. 4th!)
• Introduction to Spring: Nov. 30th - Dec. 2nd, Amsterdam, NL (early bird date is Oct. 28th!)

The Spring Framework was in full force at BEAWorld 2005 in Santa Clara, CA, where BEA and Interface21 highlighted how well BEA's WebLogic server and Spring work together, and BEA announced its endorsement of Spring on WLS that includes 24x7 support for Spring in that environment.

BEA has released their 'Spring-on-WLS' package on dev2dev. This bundle includes Spring 1.2.5 along with an enhancement to the WebLogic management console that enables real-time management of Spring Beans.

The bundle also includes a new version of BEA's MedRec sample application.  This version has been re-architected from a legacy EJB-based architecture to a Spring-based architecture for the handling of transactions, data access, and remoting, among other services.

It is interesting to note how many lines of code were saved as a result of the port to Spring.

Open Symphony's WebWork, an open source web application framework, has standardized on Spring for the configuration, assembly, and deployment of POJO-based middle-tier services.

Patrick Lightbody, co-lead of the WebWork project, notes, "as the most complete 'lightweight container' available today, Spring is the de facto standard for the management of the internal architecture of a JEE application.  We are excited to ship official Spring integration with WebWork 2.2, which is nearing final release.  This integration will make it even easier for WebWork users to use Spring."

In addition to WebWork, Spring's middleware stack integrates with a number of other established web application frameworks including Struts, JSF, Tapestry, and Spring MVC.  Spring is committed to supporting a flexible set of configurations across both JEE and JSE environments.

For more information, see Patrick's original announcement.

We're pleased to announce that Spring 1.2.5 has just been released. This is a bugfix and minor enhancement release, fixing a number of issues found in previous 1.2.x releases and introducing various minor new features.

As always, for a full list of enhancements and fixes, please see the changelog.