Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring Web Flow 2.0.0.RC1 is now available. Download | Documentation

2.0.0.RC1 introduces several new features, and fixes all known issues reported against previous milestones.

We recommend upgrading to 2.0.0.RC1 from previous Web Flow 2 milestones. We also recommend Web Flow 1 users begin evaluating their upgrade to Web Flow 2 at this time, as RC1 introduces comprehensive version 2 documentation, as well as a tool for automating the conversion of version 1 flows to the version 2 syntax.

The best way to get started with Web Flow 2 is to evaluate the reference applications included in the distribution and supplement with the reference guide.  Spring Web Flow 2 requires Spring Framework 2.5.3 and Java 1.4 or above. 

Find the new and noteworthy in the 2.0.0 RC1 release below:

2.0.0.RC1 New and Noteworthy

• Introduced the Web Flow 2 reference guide, available in PDF and HTML format. The new guide is written in "quick reference" style with runnable code examples. Read it on-line, or download the printable PDF.

• Added support for upgrading from Web Flow 1 to 2. Included in this distribution is a WebFlowUpgrader tool capable of converting flows from the version 1 syntax to the version 2 syntax. See the reference guide for instructions on how to use this tool

• Added support for flow definition inheritance. With this feature, A flow may extend one or more flows. A flow state can also extend another state. This feature is used to facilitate reuse between flows and states that share a common structure.

• Introduced Spring Portlet MVC support. See the Portlet section of the reference guide and the booking-mvc-portlet and booking-faces-portlet sample applications for examples.

• Formally introduced the new "Spring Javascript" module, included within spring-js-2.0.0.RC1.jar. This module provides a Javascript abstraction framework for applying client-side behaviors such as form validation and Ajax in a consistent manner. It also bundles a ResourceServlet for serving Javascript and CSS from jars (a CSS framework is included as well). The default UI toolkit this framework builds upon is Dojo 1. Spring's JSF integration module called "Spring Faces" builds on spring-js to provide a lightweight JSF component library for form validation and Ajax.

• Added Spring Faces integration with the RichFaces JSF component library. Rich Faces can be used with the Spring Faces component library or used standalone. A sample application illustrating this integration is available in our JIRA system.

• Added a "jsf-booking" reference application that offers a comparsion between a traditional JSF web application and a Spring web application that uses JSF as the UI component model. Compare jsf-booking with booking-faces to see the differences in the architectural approach and implementation. This comparison is particularly relevant to JSF developers interested in learning more about Spring.

• Introduced support for automatic model binding and validation with Spring MVC. This support provides a concise alternative to manual FormAction setupForm and bindAndValidate calls. This support also allows registration of data input Formatters application wide, reducing the need to manually register PropertyEditors on a view-by-view basis in many cases. Support for suppressing data binding for a event such as a cancel button click is provided. Support for invoking validators by convention is provided. See the booking-mvc sample for an example.

• Introduced view scope. View scope is allocated when a view-state enters and destroyed when a view-state exits. The scope is useful for updating a model specific to one view over a series of Ajax requests. It is also the scope used to manage JSF component state.

• Added support for flow message bundles. Create a messages.properties file in your flow's working directory for the Locales you need to support and off you go.

• Introduced configurable view-state history polices. A view state can preserve its history to support backtracking, discard its history to prevent backtracking, and invalidate all previous history to disallow backtracking after a point of no return. See the new 'history' attribute on the view-state element.

• Refined the flow execution snapshotting process. These refinements capture view-state form values on postback to support restoring those values when backtracking. This preserves edits when going back using the browser back button for data stored in flow scope.

• Simplified flow execution testing by allowing you to jump to any state to begin a test case. See the booking-mvc and booking-faces for examples of flow test cases.
  

• Improved booking-mvc as a reference application showing @Controllers together with Flows. A new FlowHandler concept provides a clean bridge between Controllers and Flows, allowing the two types of handlers to interact in a structured manner. Also improved the organization of the reference application Spring configuration to illustrate best practice.
  

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…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring .NET 1.1.1 has been released.  

Download | Site | Documentation | Changelog

This is primarily a bugfix and enhancement release but some minor new features were introduced:

• ParameterValidationAdvice to validate method arguments.
• A Required attribute and RequiredObjectFactoryPostProcessor for enforcing the configuration of required properties.
• ASP.NET Panel control to disable DI on…

Dear Spring community,
We are pleased to announce that Spring Integration 1.0.0.M3 has been released.
Download | Reference Documentation | JavaDoc

To see a list of the new features and improvements since Milestone 2, view the changelog. For more information, visit the Spring Integration Home.

Mark Fisher
Spring Integration Lead

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.

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,
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