Dear Spring community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring 2.0 M4 has been released.  Download | Docs | Changelog

Spring 2.0 M4 is the fourth milestone of the next generation of Spring.

The new and noteworthy include:

• updated JPA support
• named parameter support for JDBC acces
• refined XML schema namespaces
• auto-proxying for FactoryBean-created objects
• and many other refinements noted in the changelog.

This release also contains numerous fixes for issues discovered since M3.  Users of previous milestones are encouraged to update.  See the changelog for details on all M4 changes.

With this release we are approaching a feature freeze for the 2.0 production target, with only a few further features and refinements planned for inclusion in 2.0. The next release will be Spring 2.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1), scheduled for May.

We will also release a 1.2.8 maintenance release within a few days, backporting all applicable fixes from 2.0 M4. (This is already available from mbranch-1-2 in CVS, awaiting final tests.)

Enjoy and keep the feedback rolling in,

Juergen
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Juergen Hoeller
Lead, Spring Framework Development
Chief Architect, Interface21
http://www.springframework.org
http://www.interface21.com

Acegi Security System for Spring, v1.0.0 RC2 has now been release. Ben Alex's announcement from the mailing list is posted below:

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Dear Spring Community

I'm pleased to announce that Acegi Security release 1.0.0 Release Candidate 2 is now available. This release includes over 50 improvements and fixes since 1.0.0 RC1, including comprehensive new LDAP capabilities. We recommend that users upgrade to 1.0.0 RC2 in order to take advantage of these improvements. Upgrading to 1.0.0 will also assist us in identifying any issues as we move towards our final 1.0.0 release.

Please visit the changelog for detailed information on changes and fixes. As always, detailed upgrade instructions are included in the release ZIP file.

The project's web site at http://acegisecurity.org provides additional information on Acegi Security's features, access to online documentation, and links to download the latest release.

We hope you find this new release useful in your projects.

Cheers
Ben

Dear Spring community,

I am pleased to announce that Spring 2.0 M2 has been released.

Download it here.

Spring 2.0 M2 is the second milestone of the next generation of Spring. This release includes enhancements and new features, including refined AspectJ support and Java Persistence API (draft) support.  It also contains fixes for issues discovered since 2.0 M1.

Please see the changelog for details.

Spring 1.2.7 will also be released shortly, backporting a number of fixes and minor enhancements from 2.0 M1/M2, and providing the 1.2 series basis for the upcoming Spring Web Flow 1.0 release candidate.  The next Spring release in the 2.0 series will be 2.0 M3. Please review the roadmap for more detailed information.

Cheers,

Juergen
 
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Juergen Hoeller
Interface21 Ltd
http://www.springframework.com

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring IDE 1.2.5 has been released.
With this release of Spring IDE version 1.0.0 of the BeansXmlEditor is shipped. Additionally a few bugfixes and usability enhancements are provided. For a complete list of bugfixes and enhancements included visit http://springide.org/project/milestone/Release%201.2.5

Changes:

• XML parser Xerces updated to version 2.7.1
• bugs in BeansConfigValidator fixed:
  • check for no-arguments-constructor skipped for attribute 'autowire="constructor"'
  • skipping placeholders in classes and property names
  • init-method and destroy-method are validated now
  • required default constructor are validated now
• more suitable icons in the BeansView and the outline view of BeansXmlEditor
• new entry in BeansView context menu for opening the selected node in an text editor
• changes to BeansXmlEditor:
  • descriptive icons in outline view instead of verbose text
  • new toolbar action in outline view for alphabetically sorting
  • new entry in outline's context menu for toggeling the outline style between Spring-style and standard XML-style

More details are available from the project's site http://springide.org/

This release is available from the project's Eclipse update site http://springide.org/updatesite/

For bug reports tickets can be opened via http://springide.org/project/newticket

Interface21 is pleased to offer a number of Spring Framework training events in the upcoming period, delivered by core Spring Framework developers. For full details, please visit the main training information page. Here is a summary of the upcoming courses and venues:

• Core Spring: January 24th - 27th, London, UK
• Core Spring: February 14th - 17th, Oslo, Norway
• Core Spring: February 28th - March 3rd, Washington, DC
• Core Spring: March 14th - 17th, Paris, France
• Core Spring: March 27th - 30th, Istanbul, Turkey
• Core Spring: March 28th - 31st, Chicago, IL
• Core Spring: March 28th - 31st, London, UK
• Core Spring: April 25th - 28th, Antwerp, Belgium
• Core Spring: April 25th - 28th, Stockholm, Sweden
  
• ... plus others

The beginning of the next season of Spring is here:  Spring Framework 2.0 M1 has been released.

Download it here.

Important new features include:

• Simplified, extensible XML configuration
• Powerful new Spring AOP features and AspectJ 5 integration
• Asynchronous JMS facilities enabling message-driven POJOs
• Spring Portlet MVC, a MVC framework for JSR-168 Portlets
• ... and much, much more
  

Spring 2.0 remains 100% backwards compatible with Spring 1.2 and continues to run on Java 1.3 and greater.

A word on the new configuration enhancements: Spring 2.0 uses XML Schema to support the definition of tailored application configuration schemas.  The M1 release ships convenient XML tags that greatly simplify the definition of declarative transactions, JNDI lookups, custom aspects, and common utility services such as loading properties files.

Please review the central JPetstore sample application included in the release.  This sample demonstrates the new 2.0 features in action and will continued to be refined in subsequent milestones.

Read Juergen's original announcement on the developer mailing list for more information.

We're pleased to announce that Spring 1.2.6 has just been released. This is a bugfix and minor enhancement release, fixing a number of issues found in previous 1.2.x releases and introducing various minor new features.

As always, for a full list of enhancements and fixes, please see the changelog.

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For anybody accessing CVS, note that CVS HEAD is now finally dedicated to Spring 2.0 development. A maintenance branch "mbranch-1-2" has been created for any future work in the 1.2.x line.

During the course of this week, we will move already prepared 2.0 features from the sandbox over to the main sources. Starting with this, the nightly snapshots will be 1.3 RC1 previews, already containing 1.3 features.

We're pleased to announce that Spring 1.2.5 has just been released. This is a bugfix and minor enhancement release, fixing a number of issues found in previous 1.2.x releases and introducing various minor new features.

As always, for a full list of enhancements and fixes, please see the changelog.

We're pleased to announce that Spring 1.2.4 has just been released. This is a bugfix and minor enhancement release, fixing a number of issues found in previous 1.2.x releases and introducing various minor new features.

All Spring 1.2.x users are encouraged to upgrade to Spring 1.2.4. Watch out for a Spring 1.3 release candidate, including Portlet support, and the first Web Flow release candidate in late September!

As always, for a full list of enhancements and fixes, please see the changelog.