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…

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…

By popular demand, the Spring Framework Maven artifacts are now being uploaded to the Spring Snapshot Maven Repository. You can find details about all of the Spring Portfolio Maven repositories in my previous post but I'll reprint the details for the Spring snapshot repository here.

The Spring Snapshot Maven Repository is located at http://s3.amazonaws.com/maven.springframework.org/snapshot. Using this repository requires you to add an entry to the <repositories/> element in your POM. It should look like this:

<repository>
    <id>spring-snapshot</id>
    <name>Spring Portfolio Snapshot…

We're changing our name. This week, Interface21 will become SpringSource.

As we have built the company, Interface21 has earned a reputation for exceptional products, thought leadership, outstanding people, professionalism and top quality support and services. As we continue to deliver all of those things, we believe that changing our name will help our company bring them to a wider audience.

When I founded Interface21 in 2004, I had to pick a name. I believed Spring to be the future of enterprise Java, and "Interface21" reflected those feelings—the framework for the 21st Century. Now we’re…

Spring Web Flow 2.0 M2 has just released. I am particularly excited about this release because it sets the foundation we need to realize the bold vision we have for our community for the future. In this entry, I'll explain what that vision is, and exactly what this foundation will enable. I'll also go into detail about the architecture of Web Flow 2.0, and compare it to the 1.0 version.

The Spring Web Flow 2.0 Vision

* UPDATE: The vision above was updated on 1/11/08 after considering large amounts of feedback from the Spring community since The Spring Experience 2007. Based on that feedback, Spring Web Flow 2.…