It's the conference season. Despite the busy schedule, however, one conference stands alone for Spring content. SpringOne Europe is approaching fast. This year, it will be in Amsterdam, from April 27-29. Not only is Amsterdam a great destination in itself, the conference ends just before the Queen's Day holiday in the Netherlands: a fun cultural experience if you can spare an extra day.

SpringOne has always been a great conference, offering deep technical content and comprehensive coverage of Spring topics. We've been particularly busy over the last few months, so this year should be better than ever, with lots of new technology to talk about.

SpringOne conferences offer a unique opportunity to meet and hear from the Spring team. All the key developers will be there, including Juergen Hoeller, Adrian Colyer and the leads of most Spring projects. Whether you are most interested in Spring Integration, Spring Batch, Spring Web Flow, Spring Security, Spring's new integration with Flex, or anything else in the Spring ecosystem, you'll be in the right place. We'll also welcome sponsors including Accenture, Adobe and VMware--three companies we're vigorously collaborating with to develop interesting technology.

As the place to learn about Spring, SpringOne is the place to learn about the upcoming Spring 3.0 release. The feature set, including REST support, further significant improvements in Spring MVC and the new Spring Expression Language always seems to resonate with developers. By next month we will have also completed moving the core Spring Java Configuration model to the Spring Framework project: something I think is particularly exciting. Several SpringOne sessions will cover Spring 3.0 features, demonstrating important new features and best practices.

With our tc Server product due for GA release on April 20 and a major new release in the works for dm Server, you will also hear direct from the project teams about our new server products.

This year there will be a particular focus on developer productivity.Grails lead Graeme Rocher will speak on Grails for Spring Developers, while Groovy lead Guillaume Laforge has two sessions, on Groovy 1.6 and creating DSLs in Groovy. Spring IDE and SpringSource Tool Suite lead Christian Dupuis will talk about Enterprise Development Tools for Spring. SpringSource Tool Suite is another product just coming off a major new release, with many new features in version 2.0.

We'll also have a significant new project announcement, which we think will excite our developer community.

I hope you can join me in Amsterdam!