Spring Sighting

A new article has been published on InfoQ: Getting Started With Spring Integration. Enterprise Architect, Josh Long, describes the foundational concepts behind Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and discusses the role played by ESBs and technologies like Spring Integration. The article provides a quick primer on using Spring Integration and gives a simple example that takes inbound emails to a known address and converts them into a blog entry. It is a great way to get a fast introduction to Spring Integration.

If you are facing EAI challenages, be sure to give the article a quick read and join the discussion about Spring Integration.

A new, two part article has been published on developerWorks: Groovier Spring. Scott Leberknight, Chief Architect at Near Infinity Corporation, breaks down some great ways to use Groovy and Spring together.

• Part One: Integration Basics discusses how to write both Groovy compiled classes and .groovy scripts that produce correctly configured Spring beans. It also discusses how to use these Groovy configured beans properly in your Spring context.
• Part Two: Change application behavior at run time discusses the ability to monitor and detect changes to Groovy scripts while your application is running and automatically reload the changed beans in the Spring application context

Be sure to check it out and participate in the discussion.

A new article has just been published on JavaWorld: Distributed Transactions in Spring, with and without XA. SpringSource Principal Consultant, Dave Syer, guides you through seven patterns for distributed transactions in Spring applications, three of them with XA and four without. This article provides a follow-up to the already popular JavaWorld article from 2007: XA transactions using Spring. A forum discussion thread has been created for the community to comment on the concepts discussed. Any code updates to the samples will be tracked and recorded here. Links:

• Sample Code v1.0 (Jan 06, 2009)
• Sample Code v1.1 (Apr 12, 2009)
• Forum Discussion

Jeremy Grelle, SpringSource Senior Software Engineer and lead of the Spring Faces and Spring JavaScript projects, has written an excellent article about Spring Faces which has been published on JSF Central. Spring Faces provides first class integration between JavaServer Faces and Spring and enhances the experience of developing and running JSF applications. Jeremy's article gives an overview of Spring Faces, provides a sample application and describes how Spring Faces, together with Spring Web Flow, addresses many of the common pain points developers face when working with JSF.

Be sure to check to read Part One of the article.

DZone has just published a reference card for Spring 2.5 Configuration. The card was written by the very knowledgeable Craig Walls and provides exhaustive details about all the XML configuration options for your Spring 2.5 contexts. It provides a handy desktop reference for any developer building Spring powered applications. XML averse developers should also check out the options in Spring 2.5 for annotation based configuration.

One of the goals of Spring MVC has always been to allow you to test your controllers right inside your IDE, without having to fire up your web app in a servlet engine. It's always gratifying during trainings to see the faces of old-time Struts developers light up as they see just how easy this is to achieve. Here are a couple of blog entries I came across recently which give a glimpse into the Spring MVC testing experience:

Craig Walls: Unit-testing Spring MVC: It gets even awesomer

John Ferguson Smart: Unit testing your Spring-MVC applications

There has been some recent blogging about the upcoming Spring Tools Suite:

Adrian Colyer: The Spring Tool Suite

Mik Kersten: The Tasktop and Interface21 partnership: people, technologies and Eclipse

Mik Kersten: Why the Spring Tool Suite is building on Eclipse

InfoQ: Interface21 and Tasktop Discuss The Upcoming Spring Tool Suite

Spring Web Services has been attracting a lot of attention since its release last month. In this DDJ Interview, Arjen Poutsma, project lead for the Spring Web Services framework, talks about the importance of flexibility in addressing the O/X "impedance mismatch" between XML and Java.

For some more discussion on the same topic, also see this ServerSide thread.

Finally, with Spring Web Services as a released product, Interface21 is now offering a 2-day training course just on this topic!

Andy Piper of BEA has just blogged on WebLogic Event Server - Why we used Spring. One key driver for BEA making Spring central to this product's programming model: Spring's ubiquity. "The answer is pretty simple - use something that developers are already familiar with. Hence, in a word, Spring."

Andy also discusses how BEA were able to use Spring 2.x's extensible configuration mechanism to create a domain specific language for network assembly.

WebLogic Event Server 2.0 is designed for extremely demanding applications. It provides a lightweight front-office infrastructure for low latency, event-driven applications.

Spring is also used in the core of  BEA WebLogic Server 10.