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,

Spring Batch 1.0.0.m4 is available today via the s3 Milestone repository (browse at http://s3browse.com/explore/maven.springframework.org/milestone/org/springframework/batch).  See the Spring Batch downloads page for more information (http://static.springframework.org/spring-batch).

We have re-jigged the release schedule to squeeze in an additional milestone, to which Ben and Lucas are dedicated, so 1.0.0.m5 will be out in the next 10-14 days. Then we just have time for an rc1, with some contingency for rc2 if necessary, before the expected March 20 final release. 

Dear Spring community,

I am pleased to announce that Spring Integration 1.0.0.m1 has been released.
Download| Reference Documentation| JavaDoc

This is the first milestone release of this new addition to the Spring Portfolio. To learn more about the project and what lies ahead, visit the Spring Integration Home. To ask questions, provide feedback, or report issues during this important phase of design and development, please visit the Spring Integration Forum and Issue Tracker.

Mark Fisher
Spring Integration Lead

Spring 2.5.1 is the first bug fix and enhancement release in the Spring 2.5 series. It closes a couple of gaps found in Spring 2.5 final and introduces various new features in the context of Java 6 and Java EE 5 support:

• Java-5-specific Model interface for use with MVC handler methods
• @ModelAttribute's default attribute names are consistently derived from the *declared* parameter/return type
• Support for last-modified handling in @RequestMapping handler methods (through the WebRequest interface)
• SpringBeanAutowiringSupport class for self-autowiring classes within a web app (e.g. JAX-WS endpoints)
• EJB3-compliant SpringBeanAutowiringInterceptor for processing Spring's @Autowired in EJB3 SBs/MDBs
• Remoting support for the HTTP server that is included in Sun’s JDK 1.6 (covering HTTP invoker, Hessian and Burlap)
• "jms:listener-container" tag supports a concurrency range (e.g. "3-5"), for specifying a minimum number of consumers
• Tiles2 support works on JDK 1.4 as well
• Any many further enhancements in the details…

Spring 2.0.8 is a bug fix release in the Spring 2.0 series, addressing all issues reported since 2.0.7 and backporting various minor refinements from Spring 2.5.1. This is the last planned 2.0.x release. We recommend upgrading to Spring 2.5.1 where lots of new features are waiting for you to try them...

We are pleased to announce that the Spring .NET 1.1 final release is now available

Download | Support | Documentation | Changelog

 Feature Summary

•  Inversion of Control Container
• Aspect-Oriented Programming Framework
• Aspect Library
• ASP.NET Framework
• ASP.NET AJAX Integration
• ADO.NET Framework
• Declarative Transaction Management
• Declarative Middleware Services
• NHibernate Integration
• NUnit Integration Testing

This release has been a long time in the making and the team would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who has contributed to the project.

Happy Holidays and enjoy!

Dear Spring Community,

we are pleased to announce that Spring IDE 2.0.2 has been released today. 2.0.2 is basically a bug fix and enhancement release, but finally adds tooling support for missing Spring 2.5 features like <context:* /> and <jms:* /> namespaces and the component scan facility.

Download | Documentation | Changelog

The release is available from our release update site. Spring IDE 2.0.2 is compatible with current milestone builds of upcoming Eclipse 3.4 (aka Eclipse Ganymede).