News and Announcements  

Dear Spring community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring 2.0 M4 has been released.  Download | Docs | Changelog

Spring 2.0 M4 is the fourth milestone of the next generation of Spring.

The new and noteworthy include:

• updated JPA support
• named parameter support for JDBC acces
• refined XML schema namespaces
• auto-proxying for FactoryBean-created objects
• and many other refinements noted in the changelog.

This release also contains numerous fixes for issues discovered since M3.  Users of previous milestones are encouraged to update.  See the changelog for details on all M4 changes.

With this release we are approaching a feature freeze for the 2.0 production target, with only a few further features and refinements planned for inclusion in 2.0. The next release will be Spring 2.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1), scheduled for May.

We will also release a 1.2.8 maintenance release within a few days, backporting all applicable fixes from 2.0 M4. (This is already available from mbranch-1-2 in CVS, awaiting final tests.)

Enjoy and keep the feedback rolling in,

Juergen
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Juergen Hoeller
Lead, Spring Framework Development
Chief Architect, Interface21
http://www.springframework.org
http://www.interface21.com

The Spring team is headed to JavaOne 2006, May 16th - 19th, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.

The team will be delivering three technical sessions:

• TS-3744 Spring Framework Update - May 17th, 12:15 - Hall E 134
• TS-3456 Spring Web Flow, Dialogs for the Web - May 17th, 13:30 - Esplanade 307-310
• TS-1956 Designing Manageable J2EE™ Platform-Based Applications With JMX™ Technology - May 19th, 13:15 - Hall E 134

 as well as two Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions:

• BOF-0461 The Spring Rich Client Project: Effective Desktop Application Architecture - May 16th, 22:30 - Franciscan I
• BOF-0745 Using the Spring Framework to Enable Fast, Effective Testing - May 17th, 20:30 - Hall E 134

Each of these sessions will provide practical insight for attendees towards the application of the Spring platform... 

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 some of the upcoming courses and venues:

• Core Spring: April 25th - 28th, Antwerp, Belgium
• Core Spring: April 25th - 28th, Stockholm, Sweden
• Core Spring: May 2nd - 5th, Los Angeles
  
• Core Spring: May 16th - 19th, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Core Spring: May 22nd - 25th, New York, NY
• Core Spring: May 23rd - 26th, London, UK
• Core Spring: June 6th - 9th, Athens, Greece
• Core Spring: June 6th - 9th, Lyon, France
  
• Core Spring: June 6th - 9th, Toronto, Canada
  
• Core Spring: June 6th - 9th, Washington, DC
  
  
• ... plus others!

Spring Framework has been nominated as a finalist in the 16th annual, 2006 Jolt Product Excellence Awards put out by Software Development Magazine, under the Libraries, Frameworks, and Components category.

Acegi Security System for Spring, v1.0.0 RC2 has now been release. Ben Alex's announcement from the mailing list is posted below:

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Dear Spring Community

I'm pleased to announce that Acegi Security release 1.0.0 Release Candidate 2 is now available. This release includes over 50 improvements and fixes since 1.0.0 RC1, including comprehensive new LDAP capabilities. We recommend that users upgrade to 1.0.0 RC2 in order to take advantage of these improvements. Upgrading to 1.0.0 will also assist us in identifying any issues as we move towards our final 1.0.0 release.

Please visit the changelog for detailed information on changes and fixes. As always, detailed upgrade instructions are included in the release ZIP file.

The project's web site at http://acegisecurity.org provides additional information on Acegi Security's features, access to online documentation, and links to download the latest release.

We hope you find this new release useful in your projects.

Cheers
Ben

BEA's Bill Roth, vice president of BEA's Workshop Business Unit, describes how he sees Spring usage "busting out all over" across BEA customer sites, both large and small, and summarizes how Spring is being used at BEA.

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: February 14th - 17th, Oslo, Norway
• Core Spring: February 28th - March 3rd, Washington, DC
• Core Spring: March 28th - 31st, Chicago, IL
• Core Spring: March 28th - 31st, London, UK
• Core Spring: April 25th - 28th, Antwerp, Belgium
• Core Spring: April 25th - 28th, Stockholm, Sweden
• Core Spring: May 8th - 11th, Tel Aviv, Israel
• Core Spring: May 16th - 19th, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  
  
• ... plus others!

Dear Spring community,

I am pleased to announce that Spring 2.0 M2 has been released.

Download it here.

Spring 2.0 M2 is the second milestone of the next generation of Spring. This release includes enhancements and new features, including refined AspectJ support and Java Persistence API (draft) support.  It also contains fixes for issues discovered since 2.0 M1.

Please see the changelog for details.

Spring 1.2.7 will also be released shortly, backporting a number of fixes and minor enhancements from 2.0 M1/M2, and providing the 1.2 series basis for the upcoming Spring Web Flow 1.0 release candidate.  The next Spring release in the 2.0 series will be 2.0 M3. Please review the roadmap for more detailed information.

Cheers,

Juergen
 
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Juergen Hoeller
Interface21 Ltd
http://www.springframework.com

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring IDE 1.2.5 has been released.
With this release of Spring IDE version 1.0.0 of the BeansXmlEditor is shipped. Additionally a few bugfixes and usability enhancements are provided. For a complete list of bugfixes and enhancements included visit http://springide.org/project/milestone/Release%201.2.5