Spring 2.0 is coming and I for one am excited. I can still remember the first time that I heard about all of the new features that would be in the release at last year's The Spring Experience. The asynchronous JMS message reception and the AOP integration with AspectJ excited me the most (a bit of drooling involved actually), but even then there were many other improvements and the list has only grown since.

Alas, I know that most of you aren't middle-tier nerds like me, so what are you excited about? The new XML dialects and XSD support? The improved JSP taglib? How about that <tx:annotation-driven />? Maybe you love that Groovy…

As Interface21 grows as a global company one thing has become more and more clear to me everyday:

we really have some damn talented, highly motivated leaders who have a lot to say on both business and technology.

Here you will gain insight into what's going on at i21, from what we're working on, to what problems we're solving, to where we're going, to what we've learned along the way. You'll see a lot of diversity, as our company is doing a lot of things, from leading the development of the Spring Framework and the Spring family of products to expanding operations in five major international markets.

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The motivation behind this blog entry is to provide a simple step-by-step guide for getting started with JPA in a standalone environment with the Spring Framework. While the JPA specification originated as the persistence mechanism for EJB 3.0, it was fortunately recognized that any such mechanism should in fact be able to persist simple POJOs. Therefore, with a handful of JARs in your classpath and a few Spring-configured beans, you can begin experimenting with JPA code within your favorite IDE. I will be using Glassfish JPA - which is the reference implementation and is based upon Oracle's…

I just got finished with my Spring 2.0: New and Noteworthy talk at Atlanta DevCon 2006. Let me be the first to say that the conference was great. The site and organizers were all top notch. I'd like to give a special shout-out to Burr Sutter for putting on one heck of a conference. You know that things are going well when the conference center doesn't have a wireless network but you can get the one from the cafe next door. That's good karma! The JUG members were all very knowledgeable (even the ones that didn't know about Spring) and asked great questions. I fielded questions about EJB…

In a project that I used to work on we had a system that would receive messages from a device and make decisions on whether that information would be passed to the user. There were multiple decision levels and one of the problems we always found ourselves asking was if a message was being lost on it's way through the system.

Before we moved to Spring, it was nearly impossible to tell the answer to that question. Attempts were made to use logging, but the sheer volume of messages that decisions were made on made it tedious at best. Other attempts were made using debuggers but a combination…

With the release of Spring 1.1 the Spring community was given it’s first taste of JMS support. This support included exception translation, message conversion, and a template class much like JdbcTemplate. This support also took care of domain unification between the JMS 1.0.2 and 1.1 specs. The centerpieces of this support are the JmsTemplate class and it’s JMS 1.0.2 counterpart JmsTemplate102.

This support was a great improvement over using the raw JMS APIs to do enterprise messaging. However it did have a shortcoming; the JmsTemplate only supported synchronous reception of messages using the JmsTemplate.receive() methods. This behavior worked well for many people but the vast majority of users of ended up rolling their own implementations of an asynchronous consumer. In short, they wanted what EJB 2 called Message Driven Beans…

Recently I was working on a project that had a Swing client communicating via RMI to a service layer. The service layer was marked with transactions and everything seemed to work fine. However everytime we'd get an exception at the Hibernate DAO layer, Spring would turn the exception into a runtime exception and it would get propagated all the way up the stack and across the RMI connection as a RemoteException. Whenever the exception was deserialized there would be an exception on the client (separate from the RemoteException.The decision was taken to simply introduce an aspect. Any exception…

While the material in this post is quite simple, it will actually offer a glimpse of some rather significant new features in Spring 2.0. I hope that with a little imagination, you will be able to apply what you see here to far less trivial use cases of your own.

I am going to show 2 examples actually. The first will use a rather simple logger:

package example;

import org.apache.commons.logging.Log;
import org.apache.commons.logging.LogFactory;

public class SimpleLogger {

  private static Log log = LogFactory.getLog(SimpleLogger.class);

  public void logOneString(String s) {
    log.info…