Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the first release candidate of the Spring for Android project is now available!

Spring for Android supports usage of the Spring Framework in a Android environment. The 1.0.0.RC1 release focuses on updating support for the latest Spring Social release in native Android applications, as well as providing enhancements to Rest Template. This includes:

• Support for Spring Social 1.0.2.RELEASE, and Spring Security 3.1.0.RELEASE through the Spring for Android Auth module, which includes a SQLite datastore for persisting OAuth API connections.
• Updated RestTemplate support, now at the level of Spring Framework 3.1.0.RELEASE.
• Added support for Basic Authentication.
• Added AssetResource for accessing static resources stored in the assets directory of an Android project.
• Removed automatic loading of GsonHttpMessageConverter due to incompatibilities with preinstalled versions of Gson on some devices.
• Improved gzip support in RestTemplate.
• Now defaulting to standard J2SE facilities (HttpURLConnection) in Gingerbread and newer, as recommended by Google.
• Disabled connection reuse on Eclair and older versions when using HttpURLConnection, because of a defect in connection pooling on those versions of Android.
• Added several additional bug fixes and improvements.

Spring for Android is supported in Android version 2.1 (API Level 7) and higher.

To get the software, download the release distribution, or simply add the maven artifacts to your project. To see the features live, check out the spring-android-showcase (updated for 1.0.0.RC1).