I've recently finished up an interesting issue in Spring Web Flow. This issue (SWF-163) dealt with adding Spring 2.0 bean scoping support for Spring Web Flow's internal scopes. The implementation isn't really that interesting (the Scope interface is pretty easy to implement after all), but I wanted to mention exactly how you would use something like this in your application.

Spring 2.0 Scoping

In Spring 1.x, we had the idea of singleton and prototype bean scopes, but the notation was fixed and not especially descriptive with singleton="[true | false]". So in Spring 2.0, this notation was removed from the XSD style of configuration and now you see a notation that is more clear with scope="[singleton | prototype | ...]". Spring itself adds three more bean scopes; request, session, and globalSession which are related to web applications.

With the latest snapshots of Spring Web Flow 1.1, we now see bean scopes for the three major Web Flow scopes, flash, flow, and conversation.

<bean id="sale" class="org.springframework.webflow.samples.sellitem.Sale…

In a previous post, I described how we use a custom ANT task to upload nightly snapshots from the ANT based projects in the Spring portfolio. In this post I'll describe how we use Amazon S3 to generate pages for the snapshots from each project and allow users to download the snapshots.

As I mentioned in the previous post, S3 is primarily used as a REST-ful service. This means that while I used Java for the upload portion, I was free to use other languages for the download portion. I chose to use PHP in this case because it was already available on the server I was working with, and was the…

One of the interesting side effects of a solid CI structure is that when things are running reliably, new problems start to crop up. Shortly after Spring's CI system started running smoothly, our occasional space and bandwidth issues on static.springframework.org became more pronounced. Colin Sampaleanu had done research earlier on how to alleviate some of these problems and had settled on Amazon S3.

Amazon S3 is part of the Amazon Web Services umbrella and provides an incredibly cheap online file storage service. What does 'incredibly cheap' mean? Well, from the website, it appears that…

Over the last couple of weeks, fellow i21 employee Costin Leau and I have been working on improving the Continuous Integration processes of the Spring projects. When we started, we had separate builds running in Cruise Control, Continuum, and even a custom cron job. We were having some trouble getting any of our existing tools to give us what we wanted on all of the builds, when both Costin and I independently came upon Atlassian's new product Bamboo.

In about 10 minutes we had the Spring CI build up and running. This might not sound like much, but due to its size Spring doesn't play nicely…

There a a ton of new features in Spring AOP including the AspectJ pointcut language, the <aop:*/> namespace, and the @AspectJ syntax support. But by far one of the most powerful aspects (forgive the pun) is the AOP context binding.

For example, let's say you want to advise a method that takes a String as an argument.

public interface HelloService {
	String getHelloMessage(String toAddHello);
}

To advise this method, you'd write a pointcut that looked for a String return type, all implementations of the HelloService interface and the getHelloMessage(String) method.

@Before("execution…

At long last I can finally say that SPR-1484 is resolved. Opened on 20 November 2005 with 121 votes, 63 watchers, and even its own anti-ticket this issue rates as one of the all time biggies. In the last 10 minutes I've uploaded the maven artifacts for Spring 1.2.9 to our local repo and you should be seeing them replicated onto the central maven repo in the next 6 hours or so.

You will notice on the Spring JIRA issues such as SPR-2704, SPR-1383, and SPR-3198. What this means is that we're not done improving our builds and and we will continue to respond to the community. In fact, we've got…

I was on site at a customer last week and a question came from the crowd, "Why isn't getConfigLocations() abstract anymore?" After working in front of customers for a while, it becomes rare that you're speechless, and yet I was. To be honest, my first thought was that there was no way the customer could be right. But lo and behold, in revision 1.3 of AbstractSingleSpringContextTests it clearly states that getConfigLocations() is no longer abstract. I hadn't created any new integration tests against 2.0.1, so I hadn't even seen the change.

Surprised by this, I put in an email to Juergen to…

In the run up to The Spring Experience I've been busy but I've noticed that Rod's been really active on the blogging front. So in some spare time in airports and on planes today, I've decided to do a little blogging.

One of the biggest balancing acts that we in the Spring community have is to make sure that we stay backwards compatible while still innovating. Part of that innovation is taking advantage of new features and constructs in later versions of Java such as Java 5. Since the 1.2.x branch, we've seen some of this with things like the @Transactional annotation and our JMX auto-detection based on the @ManagedResource annotation. In the end these are great features and have greatly simplified development (at least mine anyway), but they really amount to moving metadata into the code. What we hadn't seen was…

One last Spring 2.0 announcement on a day full of them. The Maven POMs for Spring 2.0 are up in Spring's private repository. If you want to point to it directly check https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/springframework/repos/repo/. If you want to wait, they should be replicated into the Ibiblio Maven repository over the next couple of days.

For those of you who like to browse around with a bit more metadata, the ViewVC interface from SourceForge is a good choice. Remember that you should use the earlier link as a URL for maven, but you can use the later link for browsing.

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Updated 10/3 22:03: Added paragraph about ViewVC

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…