We are pleased to announce that Spring Framework 1.1 Release Candidate 2 is available. This will be the last release candidate for 1.1; release 1.1 final can be expected very soon.

Among the new features in this release are:

• the new HTTP invoker remoting strategy, which uses Java serialization over HTTP (combining the strengths of RMI and Hessian)
• RemoteInvocationFactory and RemoteInvocationExecutor strategies for HTTP/RMI invoker, for additional invocation context
• basic JSF support in the form of a JSF VariableResolver implementation that is aware of Spring-managed middle tier beans
• form simplification macros for Velocity and FreeMarker, providing HTML input macros etc for easy form building
• DispatcherServlet looks for handler adapters, handler mappings, exception res., view res. in ancestor contexts as well
• HibernateTransactionManager and HibernateInterceptor support per-transaction entity interceptor instances
• WebLogicJtaTransactionManager which can resume a WebLogic JTA transaction even if it was marked rollback-only
• MimeMessageHelper provides "addInline" methods for adding inline elements with content IDs (referenced via "cid:xxx")
• Errors interface provides "pushNestedPath"/"popNestedPath" methods, for convenient handling of temporary nested paths
• Spring's Resource objects support a "createRelative" operation, for resource paths relative to the given one

Important changes and bugfixes include:

• a constructor argument value without index will now just be considered once, rather than matched multiple times
• introduced BeanDefinitionReader interface and reworked XmlBeanDefinitionParser SPI (warning: not backwards-compatible)
• fixed TransactionAspectSupport's after-returning behavior to always call commit even if transaction is not new
• SchedulerFactoryBean reschedules triggers in case of "overwriteExistingJobs", to update triggers of persistent jobs
• fixed JmsTemplate102's "doSend" implementation to properly work with a JMS 1.0.2 API jar in the classpath

See the changelog for details.

The release can be downloaded here