News and Announcements  

We're pleased to announce that Spring 1.2.2 has just been released. This is a bugfix and minor enhancement release. It also provides a unified basis for the upcoming Spring WebFlow release candidate.

Besides refinements in the JTA transaction synchronization and SQLException translation, this release introduces a variety of internal refactorings and new helper classes. Furthermore, support for JDK 1.5's XML-based properties format has been added to all relevant Spring classes.

We have also extended our reference documentation in various areas. Most importantly, it covers JDO, TopLink, OJB, and JCA CCI now.

During the afternoon keynote of the JavaOne conference today, Mark Carges, CTO of  BEA Systems announced that, in a partnership with Interface21, BEA would be certifying the use of Spring Framework on BEA's WebLogic Server, and offering support to their customers in the use of Spring. Rod Johnson, Spring Framework founder and Interface21 CEO, was onstage as well.

From the BEA Press Release:

"Much of the innovation in programming models for the J2EE technology platform is happening in the open source community," said Carges.  "Developers already save a lot of time by using leading frameworks like Apache Beehive and Spring Framework, and the ability to mix and match the best components and deployment platforms give them optimal building blocks to get their jobs done."

We're pleased to announce that Spring 1.2.1 has just been released. This is a bugfix and refinement release, addressing a number of issues found in 1.2 final.

Furthermore, the PetClinic sample has been updated to serve as showcase for JMX export: the JDBC version exposes a cache refresh operation and a call monitor via JMX now.

We'd like to encourage all Spring 1.2 RC/final users to upgrade to Spring 1.2.1, in particular if using the Hibernate3 integration.

For complete details on changes and bug fixes, please see the change log.

We are pleased to announce that Spring Modules 0.2 has just been released.

Downloads can be found at: http://springmodules.dev.java.net.

This release includes:

• Improved OSWorkflow integration with the OSWorkflowTemplate
• Integration of Wanghy Cache under the new Spring Modules Cache banner
• JDK 5.0 Annotations support for Cache
• OSWorkflow sample application
• Improved test coverage

For a detailed list of features, see the changelog.

The OSWorkflow support is considered to be reasonably stable although feedback about the API will be warmly welcomed.

Spring Web Flow PR3 has been released. Here's Keith's mailing list announcement: 

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Dear Spring Community,

I’m pleased to announce the release of Spring Web Flow Preview 3.  This is a major new release with a substantial number of new features: both in terms of power and convenience.  This release is considered stable for development use.

Christian Dupuis has announced a new preview version of the Eclipse-based Spring-IDE which has graphical editor support for Spring Web Flow.

Here's Christian's announcement from the mailing list:

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Dear Spring Community,

We have just released the first preview version of the Spring IDE WebFlow support. Please use this release to give us feedback.

Features:

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring IDE v1.2 has been released.

Version 1.2 is a port to Eclipse 3 with a bunch of bugfixes. For a complete list of bugfixes included
visit http://springide.org/project/milestone/Release%201.2

On this lucky Friday the 13th, we are pleased to announce that Spring 1.2 final has just been released.

(Thanks to Juergen for doing the packaging and his usual coding heroics). 

The major new features since 1.2 RC2 are:

• TopLink support (for both TopLink 9.0.4 and 10.1.3)
• JDO 2.0 support (tested against JPOX 1.1 beta 3)
• Hibernate 3.0.3 support (aggressive release of Connections)

The overall major new features of Spring 1.2 are:

• finer-grained distribution jar files
• simplified XML bean definitions
• JMX support
• JDK 1.5 transaction annotation
• support for WebLogic JTA extensions
• JDBC RowSet support
• JCA CCI support
• JDO2 support
• Hibernate3 support
• TopLink support

Thanks to Oracle for donating the original TopLink support prototype,  and in particular to Jim Clark from Oracle - for all his help in getting the TopLink support into its final shape!

For details on new features, deprecations and bug fixes, please see the change log.

FYI, we have a 1.2.1 release scheduled for June, featuring minor enhancements that did not make 1.2 final. See our JIRA road map for details.

I'm happy to announce that a new, enhanced www.springframework.org is now live!

The site, sporting a new look and driven by a dynamic content management engine, should serve the needs of the Spring community much better. Expect the look and feel, as well as the capabilities of the site, to continue to evolve.

This was a lot of work. Thanks to Interface21 for sponsoring the installation, design and hosting of the new site. This site will sit on the same host as the Spring Framework Support foums. Thanks to Contegix LLC for providig excellent managed hosting, and subsidizing the bandwidth.