In the last year, new Spring projects have launched in a number of areas, including social, mobile, data, and integration. I've been doing this for nearly 7 years, and honestly it has never been as exciting for me as it is today. I feel this way because our community understands the importance of raising the bar by building on the foundations you've laid before. That's why we're able to move so quickly, and that's a testament to the quality of the core development team led by Juergen Hoeller. One thing I'm very excited about is the increasing number of community contributions we're seeing…

At SpringOne2gx we announced exciting new initiatives in the areas of social media and mobile application development. A few weeks ago, Craig Walls released Spring Social. Today, Roy Clarkson released Spring Mobile and Spring Android. In this post, I'd like to highlight these projects and share how Spring aims to simplify mobile application development. If you attended SpringOne2gx this year, you've seen Greenhouse, an app we built for our community that also serves as a reference and driver for Spring technology. Craig showed you some of the social elements of Greenhouse, such as the…

Since the big Spring 3 release last year, I've been working on a number of application development projects and extracting "showcases" of various framework features. These "showcases" are not reference applications or tutorials, they're more like acceptance tests for specific framework capabilities. After seeing a showcase, you should have a good idea of what the technology can do. The first showcase I've put together is for Spring MVC 3, our web framework. It includes a sample project, along with a supporting slide presentation and screencast. After digging in, you should have a good…

Dear Spring Community, We are pleased to announce that Spring Web Flow 2.0.9 is now available. Download | Reference Documentation | Change Log This release includes a number of minor bug fixes, as well as an update to the version of Dojo that addresses a Dojo security vulnerability. In addition to 2.0.x maintenance, the Web Flow project team is currently working on a 2.1 release that provides a current generation version of Web Flow that builds on Spring 3. At the same time, work is continuing towards the first 3.0 milestone for the next generation Web Flow. Watch for future announcements…

In my last entry, I walked you through several enhancements in Spring 3 for web application development. A number of you expressed interest in a follow-up entry focused on Ajax remoting. Spring 3 provides a lot in this area to take advantage of. Read on, and I'll walk you through it. For the purposes of this article, when I say Ajax, I'm talking about the web browser's ability to communicate with a web server asynchronously using JavaScript. On the server-side, Spring provides the programming model for defining web services, including services consumed by JavaScript clients. On the client…

As Juergen and Arjen have mentioned, Java developers everywhere have a smooth upgrade with Spring 3.0. Now that Spring 3 is out, I'd like to take you through some of the new MVC features you may not know about. I hope you find these features useful and can start putting them to work in your web applications immediately. This is also the start of a series on "Spring 3 Simplifications", so expect more posts like these in the coming days and weeks. Spring 3 introduces a mvc namespace that greatly simplifies Spring MVC setup. Along with other enhancements, it has never been easier to get Spring…

A recent commentor here ragged, "It's only half of the world that's using Maven", when pointing out it is not obvious how to obtain Spring 3 artifacts with Maven. In this entry, I'll show you how to do this and what the options are. This information will also be integrated into the reference documentation of the upcoming Spring 3 final release. In general, Spring publishes its artifacts to two different places: So the first thing you need to decide when obtaining Spring with Maven is which place you'll get it from. In general, if you care about OSGi, use the EBR, since it houses OSGi…

The Spring 3 final release is right around the corner, and it's going to be a great release. In this blog entry, I will take you through some of Spring 3's type conversion and validation enhancements. Whether you are developing a traditional web application, a desktop application, or a "next-generation" RIA, data binding, type conversion, and validation are important areas. As you'll see in this entry, Spring 3 gives you a significant upgrade in each of these areas while preserving backwards compatibility with previous releases. Before I get into features, I'd first like to highlight the…