Last Friday was Tony (C.A.R.) Hoare's birthday. Who is C. A. R. Hoare? If you're a programmer, you're probably familiar with Quicksort--an elegant and surprisingly simple sorting algorithm that is blazingly fast in most cases. If you studied computer science, you've almost certainly implemented Quicksort in numerous languages, and will recognize the animation on this page. Hoare invented Quicksort in 1960, and it's now the most widely used sorting algorithm.

Among other contributions, Hoare also invented the Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) language used to specify the interactions of…

At The Spring Experience, I hosted a session various aspects. One of them was the Hibernate synchronization aspect that I described last week. Another was an aspect capable of capturing first failures and system state, sometimes called First-Failure Data Capture (FFDC). I hosted this session to show off some aspects that are very useful, but that people might not have come across in practice yet. I often hear people asking about aspects other than logging, tracing, transaction management and security. The Hibernate synchronization aspect and the FFDC aspect are nice examples I think.

Introduction

Let's…

It has been quite a year for Spring.NET. We have gone through two milestone and two release candidates before the GA release in December. The first chunks of code for the 1.1 release were made way back in late 2004 by Aleks Seovic who started work on the ASP.NET framework. In short, it has been a long time in the making. Being the end of year, a natural time for reflection both past and present, I'd like to say thanks to the other members of the project and the Spring.NET community for all their contributions and support. I'm looking forward to a great 2008!

The feature set of Spring.NET 1.1 is quite broad. An IoC container for Dependency Injection, AOP, ASP.NET framework, declarative transaction management and more. However, the biggest bang for the buck you can get to improve the structure and testability of your code is to add Dependency Injection and AOP into your proverbial developer tool chest. Dependency Injection is the more foundational…

Mixing code in one and the same transaction that uses an Object-Relational Mapper with code that doesn't, can cause issues with data not being available in the underlying database when it should be. Since this is a situation I come across once every now and then, I figured it would be helpful for all if I write down my solution to this problem.

In short: what I will present in the remainder of this post is an aspect that triggers the underlying persistence mechanism (JPA, Hibernate, TopLink) to send any dirty data to the database.

I presented this aspect by the way during one of my sessions at The Spring Experience last December and this post also has the source code for those of you…

Sometimes important changes sneak up. Such changes aren't driven by marketing campaigns, but by many individual decisions; there's no fanfare; by the time they're observed, they have surprising momentum. I mentioned one such development in my opening keynote at the recent Spring Experience conference: the steady rise of Tomcat.

Recently we've begun running polls on SpringFramework.org, and some of the results are interesting. The question Which application server(s) do you use? produced the following results: BEA WebLogic (various versions) and JBoss AS shared first place among Java EE app…

In my recent post, I had mentioned that the Subversion repository for Spring Integration would be publicly accessible soon, and I'm pleased to provide that link now. You can checkout the project with the following command:

svn co https://anonsvn.springframework.org/svn/spring-integration/base/trunk spring-integration

If the checkout is successful, you should see the following directory structure:

spring-integration/
  +--build-spring-integration/
  +--spring-build/
  +--spring-integration-core/
  +--spring-integration-samples/

I would like to take this opportunity to walk through a couple of…

Yesterday morning I presented a 2-part session at The Spring Experience entitled "Enterprise Integration Patterns with Spring". The first presentation included an overview of core Spring support for enterprise integration - including JMS, remoting, JMX, scheduling, and email. That presentation also included a high-level discussion of several of the Enterprise Integration Patterns introduced in the book of the same name by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf. In the second presentation, I officially unveiled "Spring Integration" - a new addition to the Spring portfolio. Spring Integration builds upon…

I was cruising the blogosphere today and encountered one of the shortest blogs I've ever read. To quote nearly the entire entry, "Every time you use Acegi, a fairy dies. The sad thing is there really isn't anything better around...".

Between our community forums, developer lists, JIRA, user conference BOFs, training, support, consulting and team blog, we receive a great deal of community feedback. There is little doubt that many people have sought improvements to the Spring Security (formerly Acegi) configuration format, and we've invested a lot of time in making that possible.

As I'll be presenting at next week's Spring Experience conference, Spring Security 2.0.0 M1 features tremendously simplified configuration. You will now be able to add Spring Security to your…

Since the introduction of Spring dynamic laguage support in Spring 2.0 it has been an attractive integration point for Groovy, and Groovy provides a rich environment for defining Domain Specific Languages (DSL). But the examples of Groovy integration in the Spring reference manual are limited in scope and do not show the features in Spring that are targeted at DSL integration. In this article I show how to use those features and as an example we add bean definitions to an existing ApplicationContext with a Groovy DSL from the Grails distribution.

Groovy Beans

The basic features of Spring dynamic language integration are exposed in the "lang" namespace in XML. The most straightforward thing you can do is to defined a Spring component as a Groovy bean, in a separate file or inline in the XML. This feature is covered in the Spring reference guide (http://static.springframework.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/reference/index.html…