A couple of weeks ago, the Spring Framework project passed 1 million downloads from its home on SourceForge. The true total is probably much higher, as this figure does not include nightly builds or the other sites from which Spring can be downloaded. And, of course, Spring is included in the distributions of a large and growing range of other products. And then there's Spring.NET...

Most important, Spring continues to gain momentum: the numbers are growing very rapidly. The most downloaded version of Spring is the most recent production release, 1.2.8, which has been downloaded 175,000 times…

Welcome to my new blog! I haven't blogged since August 2004, but have been inspired by our new team blog to try to lift my game. I've also been shamed by the blog-energy of my colleagues.

I'm very excited about a lot of topics at the moment, and promise to blog much more often than once every 2 years in future... Stay tuned for my thoughts about Spring 2.0 and beyond, OO design, AOP, and the future of enterprise Java.

In the meantime, I'll share my travel schedule for the next few months (which will at least give me an excuse for not always posting regularly):

• October 1-6: JAOO conference in Aarhus, Denmark.
• October 10-11: BEAWorld event in Prague. Always a beautiful city, although Prague is no longer a cheap destination.
• October 23: Keynote about Spring 2.0 at the Oracle Develop event, a new part of Oracle Open World conference, in San Francisco. This looks set to be a big conference.
• November: I'm spending most of November in Australia, partly to visit family and friends, and partly because Interface21 has opened a new office there, headed by Ben Alex, Acegi Security lead. I'll be speaking at various events, including Spring User Groups in Sydney and Brisbane, the Sydney JUG, and a forum in Melbourne.
• November 27-28: JAX Asia conference in Singapore. This is a new conference. The German JAX conferences are big and have interesting content, so I'm looking forward to it. With amazing timing, this is just at the time I was returning to London from Sydney, so I'm literally in the area... There's also a JAX conference in Jakarta, but I'm at the limit of my travel tolerance for the next few months already and just couldn't commit to that.
• December 7-10: This is going to be the most fun. The Spring Experience, in Hollywood, Florida. This year we expect over 500 developers, and great speakers as usual. Keith is doing a great job of organizing it, along with Jay Zimmerman of No Fluff Just Stuff fame.
• 11-15 December: JavaPolis in Antwerp. A big European conference, great value for attendees and always has a top speaker lineup--probably because organizer Stephan Janssen seems to know everyone who's anyone in the Java community. And of course Belgium is always worth visiting, if only for the beer. I'm a big fan of Belgian white beer in particular.

There has been quite a bit of discussion over my recent announcement about Spring and Maven. The discussion is all very good and worthwhile, but I do want to clarify a couple of points that I made.

First and foremost, we are committed to supporting Spring users who are using Maven as their build system of choice. This means we will help ensure accurate POMs are available in the Maven repository with each Spring release starting with Spring 2.0 RC4. That is what the world's most most popular JIRA issue is all about. Nothing more.

The topic of Spring's own internal build system is a…

Spring Framework 2.0 RC4 has been released. This is the last release candidate before Spring 2.0 final, and you may find out more about it from the release announcement itself as well as the JIRA issue list for a complete list of changes in this release.

Possibly the most important thing to watch out for is that this release introduces versioned file/location names for the 2.0 DTD and Schemas (XSDs). This was necessary since the XML bean definition format was significantly enahnced for 2.0, but 1.2.x users still need to be able to refer to the 1.2.8 DTD. Here is an example of using the 2.0 "beans" schema (2.0 ships with a number of other new schemas as well, representing various special namespaces…

We are pleased to announce that Spring 2.0 RC4 has been released.  Download | Documentation | Changelog

This is the last release candidate before Spring 2.0 final.  RC4 includes many further bug fixes and refinements in various areas, as well as minor new features (for example in the JMS support). Please see the changelog and JIRA issue list for all the details.  The most notable changes include...

New and Noteworthy

• This release introduces versioned file names for the 2.0 DTD and XSDs. Please adapt your bean definition files if they build on the 2.0 XSDs on or 2.0-specific DTD features.  For example:
  

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
            xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
            xsi:schemaLocation="
                http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
                http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.0.xsd">

    <!-- Define your beans here -->

</beans>

• As you would expect, the Spring 1.2 DTD is still fully supported under its established spring-beans DTD file name.

• 2.0 XML configuration elements and attributes are now fully documented for each schema we support.  Special thanks to Rick Evans for his contribution in this area.
  

• Apache OJB support (org.springframework.orm.ojb) is no longer shipped with the core Spring distribution as of this release. It is now available from the Spring Modules project.

• Spring's JPA support is now fully tested against Oracle TopLink Essentials v2 b16 as well as Hibernate EntityManager 3.2.0 CR2. Our extensive integration test suite fully passes for both of those JPA providers now. We are currently in the process of covering OpenJPA in the same fashion.
  

We look forward to your feedback on this release.

Enjoy,

Juergen Hoeller
Lead of Spring Framework Development

Can you guess what it is? If you guessed a Maven bundle/build for Spring you win. Come see me at The Spring Experience in December and we'll share a frosty beverage as your prize.

Mea Culpa

Status

That said, it's not quite time for celebration. Converting the last two projects (Spring and Spring Web Flow) are non-trivial tasks (just take a look at Better Builds with Maven if you don't believe me). As such, the conversion is not something that we really want to do this close to the major 2.0 and 1.0 releases. What I can tell you is that the conversion is a goal scheduled for after the releases.

So what's the plan?

Then what can I, the user, do in the meantime?

Anything else you want to know about?

It started out as a small thing. Just a hunch of mine that Spring and OSGi should sit together very well. The idea was that by enabling Spring applications to be deployed in an OSGi runtime, we could bring better modularity, versioning, runtime deployment and update capabilities to Spring applications. It's a project I never really advertised; I just started experimenting, talking to a few people, and writing some early prototype code.

It turns out that a lot of people seem to be interested in Spring and OSGi. We have a collaboration ongoing with representatives from BEA, Oracle, IBM, Eclipse, the OSGi Alliance, and several others to build a shared model of how Spring support for OSGi should look, and how we can make it easy to build enterprise applications on the OSGi runtime. The most recent version of the specification is attached to Spring JIRA issue 1802. Here's a direct link to the specification text…

As most of you know, one of the big improvements in Spring 2.0 is the addition of the AspectJ pointcut language and better integration with AspectJ in general. While I think everyone believes that this will be a great benefit in the long run, it has led to some issues. We've found that there are certain behaviors that Spring AOP has always done, that AspectJ has never done.

One of the big issues that cropped up was the behavior of Before advice. If you've used Spring AOP in Spring 1.x you probably know that Spring allows you to change argument values before they are passed to the target…

Spring - here to stay for a long time I visit many clients and speak to even more on a day-to-day basis. This includes existing Interface21 clients as well as companies that are interested in our products and services across Europe. I have noticed a recurring theme in the conversations I am having: Spring is here, and it is here to stay.

Over the last year I have witnessed executive-level decisions that have standardized Spring throughout the fabric of leading Enterprise Java development firms. Just two weeks ago I asked one of my clients - a Java unit manager at one of Europe's largest…