Dear Spring community,

I'm pleased to announce that Spring Framework 2.5.3 has been released!  Download | Documentation

This is the third update release in the Spring 2.5 series. It fixes issues reported since 2.5.2 and introduces various enhancements, such as:

• @Autowired and @Required annotations interact more intuitively
• ControllerClassNameHandlerMapping detects @Controller beans by default
• "bean(...)" pointcut designator matches against bean aliases as well
• Spring 2.5 "jee:*" config elements use resource-ref="true" by default
• new CachingConnectionFactory for JMS session and producer pooling
• new DB…

Spring Security 2.0.0 RC1 is now available.

Download | Changelog | Announcement

Over 65 issues have been addressed, including OpenID integration, a new "protect-pointcut" for AspectJ expressions, dynamic retrieval of method authorization metadata, support for method authorization on all method types (interface, class, bridge, generic, superclass), restful URI authorization, namespace improvements, dependency updates and much more!

Dear Spring community,
We are pleased to announce that Spring Batch 1.0.0.FINAL has been released!

Downloads | Site | Changelog | Announcement

There are no significant high-level changes since rc1, except some updates to the reference documentation. The main functional changes were that retry and skip can now be used in the same step, and there are some extra configuration options for fatal exceptions in the step factory beans.

Dear Spring community,
I'm pleased to announce that Spring Web Services 1.5.0 has been released!

Downloads | Site | Changelog | Announcement

This final release candidate the following new features over 1.0.3:

• Two new transports: JMS and email, both for client and server,
  
• WSS4J-based WS-Security implementation, which allows for WS-Security on non-SUN JDKs (i.e. WebSphere) and JDK 1.4,
• WS-Addressing support for both client and server, supporting the August 2004 and final versions of the specification,
  
• Native support for Java 6, including JAXP 1.4, and the bundled SAAJ 1.3 and JAXB 2.0,
  
• Two new Spring namespaces, which drastically decrease the amount of XML required to configure marshallers and typical Spring-WS constructs,
  
• Spring-WS jars are now OSGi bundles,
  
• A new, client-side interception mechanism, including WS-Security support,
  
• @Endpoints are now @Components, so they are automatically picked up when using Spring 2.5 component scanning
• A new and improved XSD-to-WSDL generator that inlines included and imported XSDs
• Support for Spring Security
• Support for the Java 6 HTTP Server
• Two new samples, showing Plain Old XML usage and WS-Addressing with the Java 6 HTTP server

and many small improvements and bug fixes. Check the changelog for more details.

We recommend upgrading to Spring Web Services 1.5 from all previous versions, in order to benefit from these new features!

The 1.5 series is 95% backwards compatible, though support for Java 1.3 has been dropped, in favor of Java 1.6.

Cheers,

Arjen Poutsma
Spring Web Services Lead

I'm pleased to announce that Spring Batch 1.0.0.rc1 has been released.  You can access this release via the Spring Maven Milestone Repository (browse) or via the Download Page.

This is the first release candidate for the Spring Batch 1.0.0 release with an anticipated final release on 28 March.  The major changes for this release are:

• Improvements in Reference Documentation
• Reorganization of packaging structure in spring-batch-infrastructure and spring-batch-core
• Merging of the spring-batch-core and spring-batch-execution modules

Please see the changelog for details.

Ben Hale
Spring Batch Technical…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring Web Flow 2.0 M4 is now available.  Download | Documentation

This release firms up the Web Flow 2 architectural model, including how SWF 2 integrates with Spring MVC, JavaServerFaces, and Ajax.  It also introduces many new features and improvements, including:

2.0 M4 New and Noteworthy

• The introduction of a simplified XML flow definition syntax.   See the Spring Travel reference application for an example of the new syntax.

• Use of the version 2 syntax reduces the size of a version 1 flow definition by up to 50%.  As an example, Spring Travel 1.0.5 consists of ~200 lines of flow-application code across six artifacts.  The latest 2.0 M4 version consists of 93 lines of code across two artifacts, a 50% reduction with four less files to maintain. 
  

• Savings are achieved primarily by stronger Expression Language (EL) integration and simpler tags for action execution and data mapping.

• Spring Security integration.  Full support for securing flows, states, and transitions is provided.
  A new "currentUser" EL variable makes it easy to reference the authenticated Principal from a flow definition or view template.

• Flexible support for flow exception handling inside Spring MVC, including default support for automatically restarting ended or expired flows.

• Support for handling Ajax events that do not change the current page.  A new "render" element allows you to selectively re-render fragments of a page after handling an Ajax event.

• View variables.  A view variable allocates when its containing view-state enters and goes out of scope when the state exits.  These variables provide a page context and are particularly useful for updating a model over a series of Ajax requests from the same page.

• @Autowired flow variables.  Flow variables may now have their dependencies @Autowired by Spring, enabling them to hold references to Spring-managed @Services.   References to services are automatically re-wired for you between requests after variable deserialization.

• Support for popups.  Mark a view-state with popup=true and it will render in a modal popup dialog when Javascript is enabled on the client.

• The factoring out of a Javascript abstraction layer called "Spring Javascript" from Web Flow's JSF support.  Currently, Dojo and Ext based implementations of this layer are provided.  Spring.js provides:
  
• A common interface for Ajax, regardless of which toolkit is being used under the covers
• An aspect-oriented-like API for decorating HTML DOM nodes with behaviors, including client-side validation behaviors.

• A small JSF component library that uses Spring.js underneath to progressively enhance Spring web applications using JSF.  This library degrades if Javascript is not available on the client.  See the Spring Travel example for an illustration: turn Javascript off and compare the application to when Javascript is turned on.

• Support for rendering JSF views in a standard Spring MVC environment.  This enables Facelets templates to be rendered by plain Spring MVC Controllers as well as Flows.

Please see the Spring Travel reference applications included in the release for practical demonstrations of all these features.  The reference projects are directly importable into Eclipse as Dynamic Web Projects.

1.x Compatibility

A special note to existing Web Flow users: The upcoming 2.0 RC1 will provide support for version 1 flows in a version 2 environment.  This will allow 1.0.x flows to run unchanged along side version 2 flows in the same application.

For more information, see the full Web Flow 2 ChangeLog and RoadMap.  We also encourage you to visit our support forums and JIRA system to provide your feedback on M4 to the development team.

Enjoy!  2.0 final is right around the corner.

Keith Donald
Web Flow Technical Lead
SpringSource

Spring Batch 1.0.0.m5 is available today via the s3 Milestone repository (browse at http://s3browse.com/explore/maven.springframework.org/milestone/org/springframework/batch). For more information, please see the Spring Batch downloads page at http://static.springframework.org/spring-batch.

The main change in m5 from the user's point of view is the configuration of jobs, steps and the launcher environment through various factory beans. Several key user concerns have been addressed by the new BatchListener group of interfaces. There are also some changes to key interfaces in the API, like ItemReader and ItemWriter, which have allowed us to separate concerns better between the user and the framework. There is a section on the website describing in detail how to migrate from 1.0.0.m4 to 1.0.0.m5 (http://static.springframework.org/spring-batch/migration/1.0-m4-m5.html).

We are very pleased with the progress we made on Spring Batch since the last milestone, and it now feels finally as if everything is almost in place for a final release. As planned, we now just have time for an rc1 release, with some contingency for rc2 if necessary, before the expected March 20 final release.

Dear Spring community,
 
I'm pleased to announce that Spring Framework 2.5.2 has been released. Download | Documentation
 
This is the second update release in the Spring 2.5 series. It fixes all issues reported since 2.5.1 and introduces various enhancements throughout the framework:

• Restored full Spring 2.0 compatibility for specific extension points
• Extended SQL error code mappings for MS SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle
• Revised JDBC BeanPropertyRowMapper with refined value extraction logic
• Support for the GlassFish/JBoss JCA WorkManager as TaskExecutor backend
• Support for Eclipse Persistence Services 1.0 M4 (the EclipseLink JPA provider)
• Compatibility with the WebSphere JPA provider (derived from OpenJPA)
• @RequestMapping supports "!myParam" expressions for non-presence of a parameter
• @RequestMapping's "params" attribute supported at the type level as well
• Revised JSP CheckboxesTag and RadioButtonsTag (for strict HTML compliance)

Dear Spring community,