News and Announcements  

Dear Spring community,

I'm pleased to announce that Spring Dynamic Modules for OSGi(tm) Service Platforms (formerly known as Spring OSGi) 1.0 RC2 has been released.
Downloads| JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | FAQ

Spring 2.5.1 is the first bug fix and enhancement release in the Spring 2.5 series. It closes a couple of gaps found in Spring 2.5 final and introduces various new features in the context of Java 6 and Java EE 5 support:

• Java-5-specific Model interface for use with MVC handler methods
• @ModelAttribute's default attribute names are consistently derived from the *declared* parameter/return type
• Support for last-modified handling in @RequestMapping handler methods (through the WebRequest interface)
• SpringBeanAutowiringSupport class for self-autowiring classes within a web app (e.g. JAX-WS endpoints)
• EJB3-compliant SpringBeanAutowiringInterceptor for processing Spring's @Autowired in EJB3 SBs/MDBs
• Remoting support for the HTTP server that is included in Sun’s JDK 1.6 (covering HTTP invoker, Hessian and Burlap)
• "jms:listener-container" tag supports a concurrency range (e.g. "3-5"), for specifying a minimum number of consumers
• Tiles2 support works on JDK 1.4 as well
• Any many further enhancements in the details…

Spring 2.0.8 is a bug fix release in the Spring 2.0 series, addressing all issues reported since 2.0.7 and backporting various minor refinements from Spring 2.5.1. This is the last planned 2.0.x release. We recommend upgrading to Spring 2.5.1 where lots of new features are waiting for you to try them...

Dear Spring Community,

we are pleased to announce that Spring IDE 2.0.2 has been released today. 2.0.2 is basically a bug fix and enhancement release, but finally adds tooling support for missing Spring 2.5 features like <context:* /> and <jms:* /> namespaces and the component scan facility.

Download | Documentation | Changelog

The release is available from our release update site. Spring IDE 2.0.2 is compatible with current milestone builds of upcoming Eclipse 3.4 (aka Eclipse Ganymede).

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring LDAP version 1.2.1 has been released. This is an update release that adds a new pooling library and fixes a few problems that were in 1.2. Download | ChangeLog

A summary of the more important changes:

• Added pooling library which features flexible connection validation and better configuration than the built-in pooling. Many thanks to Eric Dalquist for this contribution. (LDAP-85)
• Fixed a problem in AbstractContextSource which led to an unnecessary reference to the LDAP Booster Pack (ldapbp). (LDAP-88, LDAP-89)
• Fixed bug in SimpleLdapTemplate where the wrong target method was being called. (LDAP-93)
• Made createContext in AbstractContextSource protected rather than package private. (LDAP-94)

Spring Batch 1.0.0.m3 is now available via the Spring Portfolio Milestone Repository (browse).  See the Spring Batch downloads page for more information.

We have had a lot of good feedback from the community, and from a large number of Accenture projects that are using or evaluating Spring Batch.  So the 1.0.0-m3 release has quite a range of bug fixes and new features.  The main impact to existing users will be class name changes in the input and output abstractions.  New (non-Maven) users will find it much easier to get started with the new .zip assembly including all dependencies.  There is also a new section on the website describing in detail how to migrate from 1.0-m2 to 1.0.0.m3.

I would also like to welcome Ben Hale on board as the new SpringSource technical lead on Spring Batch.  Ben will be working full time on Spring Batch, and moving to the UK in January 2008 to concentrate on this work.  With Ben's help we have put together a plan for the last milestone 1.0.0.m4 which delivers at the end of January or early February.  After that we anticipate, barring unforeseen problems, a fast turn over into rc1 and 1.0.0 final.  As usual you can track the roadmap via JIRA.

Dave.

Dear Spring community,

I'm pleased to announce that Spring Dynamic Modules for OSGi(tm) Service Platforms (formerly known as Spring OSGi) 1.0 RC1 has been released.
Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | FAQ

The first release candidate, 1.0 RC1 finalized the feature set left for 1.0 branch, fixed the bugs reported against M3 and introduced various feature refinements such as:

* improved public APIs
* new custom signature supported for service importer listeners
* global defaults for service importers
* registration/unregistration listener for service exporters
* unified exception hierarchy
* highly improved documentation

For the list of changes and road map see:
http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/spring/browse/OSGI

Cheers,
Costin Leau
Lead Spring Dynamic Modules

Dear Spring Community,
 
We are pleased to announce that the Spring Framework 2.5 final release is now available.

Download | Support | Documentation | Changelog 

Spring 2.5 enhances Spring 2.0 with many exciting new features, including:

• Full Java 6 and Java EE 5 support (JDBC 4.0, JTA 1.1, JavaMail 1.4, JAX-WS 2.0)
• Full-featured annotation-driven dependency injection, including support for 'qualifiers'
• Support for auto-detecting application components in the classpath and auto-configuring them as Spring managed objects
• A new bean name pointcut element in AspectJ pointcut expressions
• Built-in support for AspectJ load-time weaving based on the LoadTimeWeaver abstraction
• New XML configuration namespaces "context" and "jms", for maximum convenience
• A completely revised integration test framework, with first-class support for JUnit 4 and TestNG
• A new annotation-based controller model for Spring MVC supporting Servlet and Portlet environments
• Extended SimpleJdbcTemplate functionality, including support for named SQL parameters
• Officially certified WebSphere support
• The packaging of Spring Framework jars as OSGi-compliant bundles out of the box
• The ability to deploy a Spring ApplicationContext as a JCA RAR file, for headless application modules
• JCA 1.5 message endpoint management, for Spring-managed JMS and CCI message listeners

Check out the series What's New in Spring 2.5? for a walkthrough of the new Spring 2.5 features, including information on how to deploy the Spring sample applications that demonstrate them.

We recommend upgrading to Spring 2.5 from all previous Spring 2.0.x versions in order to benefit from the new features as well as the significant performance enhancements that Spring 2.5 has to offer. Spring 2.5 is designed as a drop-in replacement for Spring 2.0, except for the slightly restructured jar file contents (please see the readme file in the distribution for more information on this).

Please note that Spring 2.5 is still compatible with JDK 1.4.2+ and J2EE 1.3+. Java 1.4 users, for example on WebLogic 8.1 or WebSphere 5.1/6.0, are very welcome to upgrade to Spring 2.5 as well.  We recommend putting the backport-util-concurrent jar on the classpath when running on Java 1.4, which allows Spring and your applications to benefit from significant concurrency enhancements.

Enjoy Spring 2.5,

Juergen Hoeller
Lead, Spring Framework Development

(updated 2007-11-22) 

SpringSource (formerly 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: November 6th - 9th, New York, NY
  
• Core Spring: November 13th - 16th, Dallas, TX
• Core Spring: November 27th - 30th, Washington, DC
  
• Core Spring: December 4th - 7th, San Diego, CA
• Core Spring: December 17th - 20th, Washington, DC
• Core Spring: December 17th - 20th, Boston, MA
  
• Core Spring: January 8th - 11th, Orlando, FL
• Core Spring: January 15th - 18th, Chicago, IL
  
• Core Spring: January 22nd - 25th, Seattle, WA
  
• Core Spring: January 29th - Feb 1st, Washington, DC (Dulles)
  

• Europe
• Core Spring: November 5th - 8th, Oslo, Norway
  
• Core Spring: November 6th - 9th, Paris, France
• Core AOP: November 15th - 16th, Malmo, Sweden
• Core Spring: November 20th - 23rd, Stuttgard, Germany
  
• Core Spring: November 20th - 23rd, Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Core Web Services: November 26th - 27th, Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Core Spring: November 27th - 30th, Copenhagen, Denmark
• Core AOP: December 6th - 7th, London, UK
• Core Spring: December 11th - 14th, London, UK
  
• Core Spring: January 15th - 18th, London, UK
  

• Australia/Asia/Other
  
• Core Spring: November 5th - 8th, Brisbane, Australia
  
• Core Spring: November 5th - 8th, New Delhi, India
• Core Spring: November 19th - 22nd, Bangalore, India
• Core Spring: November 20th - 23rd, Cheng Du, China
• Core Spring: December 3rd - 6th, Sydney, Australia
• Core Spring: December 10th - 13th, Melbourne, Australia
  
• Core Spring: December 18th - 21st, Dalian, China

... plus others

Interested in a full-course of Spring during Winter? The Spring Experience 2007 conference is taking place in sunny Hollywood, Florida, from Dec. 12th-15th.

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce the release of Spring LDAP version 1.2. This is a major release that introduces a number of features and bugfixes.

            Download | ChangeLog | Documentation (HTML) | Documentation (PDF) | API

A summary of the more important changes:

• Java 5 Generics support is now provided with the SimpleLdapTemplate and ParameterizedContextMapper classes.
• Client-side LDAP transactions.
• Several additional API methods, simplifying a number of common tasks.