It's Spring time

We are pleased to announce that Spring 1.2 RC1 has just been released. This release introduces a number of major new features:

• finer-grained distribution jar files, alongside the full spring.jar
  
• AOP Alliance interfaces are now contained in spring-aop.jar and spring.jar
  

XML bean definition improvements ("ref" and "value" shortcut attributes
etc)

improved AOP TargetSourceCreator mechanism (supporting
LazyInitTargetSource too)

transaction annotation support for JDK 1.5+ (annotation called
"Transactional")

improved WebLogicJtaTransactionManager (transaction names, isolation
levels)

SqlRowSet support for JDBC (in conjunction with JdbcTemplate's
"queryForRowSet")

Hibernate3 support (in orm.hibernate3; Hibernate 2.1 support is still
available)

JMX support for export of Spring beans as managed resources and for MBean
access

Commons Attributes and JDK 1.5+ annotations for JMX MBean export

This release also contains many minor enhancements, for example:

factored out BindingErrorProcessor strategy for ServletRequestDataBinder

improved ParameterMethodNameResolver for Web MVC MultiActionController

For a detailed list of enhancements and bug fixes, see the changelog.

This release candidate is already considered stable and recommended for development use. We expect Spring 1.2 final to be released in late April.

Watch out for the Spring Web Flow preview release to follow later this week (for use with Spring 1.2)! Web Flow will also become part of the nightly build at that time.