News and Announcements  

Dear Spring community,

I'm pleased to announce that Spring 1.2.9 has finally been released. Download | Docs | Changelog.

This is a bugfix and refinement release for people still using the 1.2 series, and is intended as a drop-in update for Spring 1.2.8. It contains fixes for all problems reported since 1.2.8, and includes various backports from the Spring 2.0 branch.

Note that this is the last planned release in the Spring 1.2 branch. Patch releases for 1.2.9 will only be provided in case of critical issues. We recommend to upgrade to Spring 2.0 for long-term usage.

Cheers,
Juergen
 
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Juergen Hoeller
Interface21
http://www.interface21.com

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: March 13th - 16th, Dallas, TX
• Core Spring: April 3rd - 6th, Washington, DC
• Core Spring: April 3rd - 6th, Seattle, WA
• Core Spring: April 17th-20th, Atlanta, GA
• Core AOP: April 24th - 27th, Seattle, WA
• Core Spring: May 1st - 4th, Philadelphia, PA
  
• Core Spring: May 15th - 18th, Washington, DC (Downtown)
  
• Core Spring: May 22nd - 25th, Chicago, IL
• Core AOP: May 22nd - 25th, Philadelphia, PA
  

• Europe/Asia/Australia
• Beginning Spring: March 13th - 15th, Amsterdamn, NL
• Core Spring: March 13th - 16th, Oslo, Norway
• Core Spring: March 19th - 22nd, Melbourne, Australia
• Core Spring: March 20th - 23rd, London, UK
• Core Spring: March 20th - 23rd, Antwerp, Belgium
• Core Spring: March 27th - 30th, Stockholm, Sweden
• Core AOP: April 2nd - 5th, London, UK
  
• Core Spring: April 10th - 13th, London, UK
  
• Core Spring: April 16th - 19th, Karlsruhe, Germany
  
• Core Spring: April 16th - 19th, Brisbane, Australia
  
• Core Spring: April 17th - 20th, Wellington, NZ
  
• Core Spring: April 17th - 20th, Rome, Italy
  
• Core Spring: April 30th - May 3rd, Canberra, Australia
  

... plus others

The version 4.0 of JSF-Spring has been released: Here is the announcement:
In our JSF projects, we’ve been greatly disappointed by two factors: the lack of “webness”, given the fact that everything is a POST, the dependency to JavaScript, and the often cumbersome JSF specification. On the other hand, features like the standard request lifecycle and form validation proved to be very useful.The new features in JSF-Spring 4.0 are our attempt to enable developers to take advantage of JSF as a component based framework but still deliver applications that conform to well established web standards: To the HTT protocol with it’s Noun/Verb model and the resulting REST model for web applications. You can find further details in the documentation on the JSF-Spring project: http://jsf-spring.sourceforge.net/reference/index.html. We’re very excited about the new perspectives for JSF-Spring and we hope you’ll share our enthusiasm!

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: February 6th - 9th, Los Angeles, CA
  
• Core Spring: February 20th - 23rd, Chicago, IL
• Core Spring: February 27th - March 2nd, Washington, DC
• Core Spring: March 6th - 9th, New York, NY
• Core Spring: March 13th - 16th, Dallas, TX
• NEW!: Core Spring: April 3rd - 6th, Washington, DC
• Core Spring: April 3rd - 6th, Seattle, WA
• Core Spring: April 17th-20th, Atlanta, GA
• Core AOP: April 24th - 27th, Seattle, WA

• Europe/Asia/Australia
• Core Spring: February 5th - 8th, Singapore
• Core AOP: February 6th - 9th, London, UK
• Core Spring: February 13th - 16th, Paris, France
  
• Core Spring: February 19th - 22nd, Sydney, Australia
• Core Spring: February 20th - 23rd, Amsterdamn, NL
• Core Spring: February 20th - 23rd, London, UK
• Beginning Spring: March 13th - 15th, Amsterdamn, NL
• Core Spring: March 19th - 22nd, Melbourne, Australia
• Core Spring: March 20th - 23rd, London, UK
• Core Spring: March 20th - 23rd, Antwerp, Belgium
• Core Spring: March 27th - 30th, Stockholm, Sweden
  

... plus others

The Sweden Spring User Group has been founded. The group will be backed by Jayway, the leading Java house in Sweden. The goal is to arrange activities and seminars, and exchange information, experiences and opinions about the Spring framework and other related technologies. The User Group is available at http://groups.google.com/group/swedenspring. The communication in the group is in Swedish. We are looking forward to meet you there and have a lot of interesting discussions!

Oracle has released a Spring extension for JDeveloper. It looks like the primary author is Duncan Mills. While this is an early access release, it already looks quite compelling (see the screenshots via the link below). It's also great news for Spring users as it means that there are now Spring specific extensions for all 4 common Java IDEs in use today.

Here's a feature description:

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The new Spring extension for JDeveloper simplifies development of Spring based applications with the following features:

• Automatic Spring library configuration
• Spring beans.xml file creation wizard - with automatic project configuration
• Powerful editing features dor the various Spring XML files including:
• code insight
• code completion
• component palette
• visual construction.
• declarative property editing

With the new extension Spring developers can enjoy JDeveloper's advanced development environment featuring visual JSF/JSP/Swing editors, UML modeling, database browsing, XML and Web services capabilities and much more...

JDeveloper and the Spring extensions are available for free from http://www.oracle.com/technology/index.html .
 
The URL for the new Spring extension (including some screen shots) is:   http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/htdocs/partners/addins/exchange/spring/spring-extension.html

The reference implementation of JAX-WAS (located at java.net) has added direct support for Spring-based configuration, via a custom Spring namespace! This allows you to wire your service implementation classes as well as handlers in a Spring application context.

This is part  of an ongoing effort from the GlassFish guys to to improve Spring integration. They are seeking input from the Spring community to help them add value here, so please let them know what you'd like to see!

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: January 9th - 12th, Orlando, FL
  
• Core Spring: January 23rd - 26th, Washington, DC
  
• Core Spring: February 6th - 9th, Los Angeles, CA
  
• Core Spring: February 20th - 23rd, Chicago, IL
• NEW!: Core Spring: February 27th - March 2nd, Washington, DC
• Core AOP: March 6th - 9th, Chicago, IL
  
• Core Spring: March 6th - 9th, New York, NY
• Core Spring: March 13th - 16th, Dallas, TX
• Core Spring: April 3rd - 6th, Seattle, WA

• Europe/Asia
• Core Spring: January 22nd - 25th, London, UK
  
• Core Spring: February 5th - 8th, Singapore
• Core AOP: February 6th - 9th, London, UK
• Core Spring: February 13th - 16th, Paris, France
  
• Core Spring: February 19th - 22nd, Sydney, Australia
• Core Spring: February 20th - 23rd, Frankfurt, Germany
• Core Spring: February 20th - 23rd, Amsterdamn, NL
• Core Spring: February 20th - 23rd, London, UK
• Beginning Spring: March 13th - 15th, Amsterdamn, NL
• Core Spring: March 19th-22nd, Melbourne, Australia
• Core Spring: March 20th - 23rd, London, UK
• Core Spring: March 20th - 23rd, Antwerp, Belgium
  

... plus others

Another very significant announcement for Spring developers, in the week leading up to The Spring Experience 2006: TerraCotta last week announced that they were open sourcing their JVM clustering solution, Terracotta, including the Spring integration library, Terracotta for Spring. The project will be known as Open Terracotta. At the conference, Terracotta's Jonas Boner showed the Spring integration in action, in a Rapid Fire Session.

More information on the Open Terracotta via the following links:

Terracotta Goes Open Source

infoQ: Terracotta open source JVM clustering 

TSS: Terracotta DSO: Open Sourced 

 

Leading up to The Spring Experience 2006 conference last week, Tangosol and Interface21 announced the release of Tangosol's Coherence Data Grid for Spring. This is a fully realized integration between Spring Framework and Tangosol's Coherence Data Grid. At the conference, Tangosol's Brian Oliver and Spring developer Rob Harrop showed the integration in action. More info and discussion at the following links:

Coherence Data Grid for Spring info page

Tangosol Press release 

infoQ: Tangosol Coherence Data Grid Adds Enhanced Spring Support

TheServerSide.com: Tangosol Coherence Data Grid Supports Spring Framework