A couple of month ago, we start publishing polls on www.springframework.org asking people to provide their feedback about Spring, some of its features and how they are using those features. The first question I posted was whether or not people were checking required dependencies and if so, what mechanisms they used. I quickly followed up on this question asking the community what transaction management strategy it used.

To my delight when I first checked the results, back in March, a lot of people told us by voting in the first poll that they were using the @Required annotation. The second…

The Java EE 6 proposal (JSR 316) was published today. I believe that this will be the most important revision of the platform since it was released nearly 10 years ago, and that it should be welcomed by users of the technology. Interface21 is happy to be a supporter of this JSR, and I am looking forward to contributing to it.

Java EE (known as J2EE for most of its history) has played a valuable role in creating a market for Java middleware. However, over those 10 years, important issues have emerged with the platform, such as:

• The need for a Java EE compliant server to be bloated with a range of functionality that is of little interest to the vast majority of users
• The fact that enterprise requirements have changed since J2EE was envisaged and that a "one size fits all model" is less and less appropriate
• The fact that enterprise Java has been greatly strengthened by the emergence of frameworks (especially in open source) that make developers more productive and their production applications more efficient and maintainable
• New challenges such as Ruby on Rails, and even .NET, showing that, in a time of rapid change and innovation, a cosy 2-3 year release cycle imperils the entire platform

Java EE 6 is an important revision of the platform that has the…

Michael Hickins recently published a piece on eWeek entitled Is Open Source Dying? The title drew me in, and no doubt plenty of other folk too. But the article doesn't prove the case, although it contains some interesting points that merit discussion.

Most of the article concerns speculation about the experience of government with open source, and the motives of vendors such as IBM. I prefer to judge companies and individuals by their actions, rather than speculation about their motives, and there is plenty of evidence that IBM, for example, takes open source very seriously. There's plenty of…

As promised to everyone in my sessions, here are all the code samples that I presented during the conference.

Concurrency and Spring JMX Dynamic Languages

Slides will be available from the SpringOne web site.

I was reading an article by Vigil Bose on TSS the other day and saw the usage of the HibernateDaoSupport class. Since this is no longer a recommended way of using Hibernate from Spring, I thought I might as well just blog about it another time.

With the advent of Spring 2.0, it has become possible to start using the Hibernate Session API directly again. The question is whether or not it is wise to abandon the use of the HibernateTemplate when working with Hibernate, or any other template-based approaches Spring features.

Using Spring XxxTemplates

Acquisition of connection: If transaction synchronization is active…

Last week at SpringOne, Alef and I gave a talk on dealing with complex applications using Spring. Complexity in this case was considered both at the structural and dynamic level. As for the structural part of the talk, I covered that one in my previous blog posting. The dynamic part explained some possible solutions to deal with differences between your deployment environments. (testing, acceptance, production, etc.) A lot of people asked me if I could provide them with the source of the demonstrations I gave during the talk. I've attached the sources to this blog entry and will explain…

In the last session of SpringOne yesterday, Dave Syer, Scott Wintermute, Lucas Ward and Wayne Lund all presented on Spring Batch. I didn't actually attend (since I had an early cab ride), but I stuck my head in and was yet again astounded by the amount of interest.

Back at JavaOne we had an immense amount of interest in this solution as well, with plenty of visitors calling by the booth to quiz us about batch.

It's all too easy in this world of Ajax and Rich Internet Applications to forget that a large number (a majority maybe?) of large scale enterprise applications are batch-oriented. Batch…

Load testing a Web Flow application is similar to load testing any other web application – we'll use a load testing tool to simulate increasing levels of concurrent client access in order to capture essential performance statistics.

With Web Flow there will be a couple of important considerations for the load test:

1. The load test must maintain independent “cookie storage area” so each client request can carry an independent HTTP session.
2. We need a mechanism for extracting the unique flow execution key from the initial response and use it to customize subsequent requests in the same flow session.

Apache JMeter is an open-source performance test tool that can satisfy both considerations.

For 1) we add an HTTP Cookie Manager element at the root of each Test Group exercising Web Flow functionality. The Cookie Manager ensures each simulated client request can have its own…

SpringOne is humming along nicely. This year it's a 3 day show, up from 2 days last year, and once again it's great to see hundreds of attendees at a Spring conference. For once I'm quite relaxed at a show, as after the opening keynote I have no further sessions, and don't need to work on slides.

Right now, Adrian is preparing to make a major announcement about Spring tooling. Well actually he's giving a uniquely personal take on duck typing, as I'm sure you'll hear...

More about that later, but first I need to share some news from yesterday. I was happy to be able to announce that we have…