Acegi Security 1.0.0 is released

Releases | Ben Alex | May 30, 2006 | ...

After more than two and a half years of development, I am delighted to announce that Acegi Security 1.0.0 is now officially released.

Download | Documentation | Changelog 

In addition to more than 80 improvements and fixes since 1.0.0 RC2, this new release includes several changes to help new users. This entails a significant restructure and expansion of the reference guide (now at more than 90 pages) and a new "bare bones" tutorial sample application.

Furthermore, many of the frequently-identified problems experienced by new users have been addressed, such as:

  • custom 403 messages (as opposed to using the Servlet Container's error handler)
  • detecting corrupt property input following the reformatting of XML files
  • a new logout filter. 

We've also refactored our LDAP services, made the SecurityContextHolder a pluggable strategy (especially useful for rich clients who wish to avoid ThreadLocal), and improved CAS support.

Please visit here for a detailed changelog. 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. I will also be providing a presentation on Acegi Security at SpringOne next month, so I hope to see you there.

Spring Framework 1.2.8 Released

Releases | Juergen Hoeller | May 08, 2006 | ...

Dear Spring community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring 1.2.8 has been released. Download | Docs | Changelog

This is a maintenance release, fixing a number of issues found in previous 1.2.x releases. Most of these fixes have been backported from 2.0 M4, so have already been available there. Please see the changelog for details.

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

Spring Web Flow 1.0 RC1 Released

Releases | Keith Donald | May 03, 2006 | ...

Spring Web Flow Logo

Dear Spring Community,

We are very pleased to announce that Spring Web Flow (SWF) 1.0 RC1 (Release Candidate 1) has been released.  Download it.

After over a year of hard development work, 29,000 downloads, 3,700 posts by 500 forum users, one book, and numerous community-driven articles, this release delivers the first 1.0 release candidate of Spring Web Flow.  Considered fit for production use, this release solidifies the 1.0 API which will remain backward compatible throughout the entire 1.x series.

To the Spring Web Flow early adopters and champions who have supported our product, thank you.  Spring Web Flow delivers one of the most innovative and powerful controller engines available today thanks to your feedback and support.

The Spring Web Flow team expects one more release candidate before 1.0 final.  The new and noteworthy in 1.0 RC1 include...

NEW AND NOTEWORTHY

Improved support for managing stateful business components.  Spring Web Flow now employs several techniques for managing instances of stateful middle-tier components that execute business logic as part of a task execution.  In most cases, state management is completely transparent.  You simply store your application state in instance variables and Spring Web Flow handles scoping that state within a conversation in a thread safe manner.

This support is illustrated by the simple NumberGuess sample application, where a "Game" component managed by the flow carries out the execution of game business logic.  The component itself has zero dependencies on Spring Web Flow APIs.

 To demonstrate, the business interface of the Game component could be defined as:

Game interface

The flow definition to carry out execution of a Game with a user could look like: 

 Game flow

Lastly, the binding between the logical game action identifier and a Game implementation is made by Spring within game-beans.xml.

 Game beans

The HigherLowerGame implementation is also completely decoupled from Spring and Spring Web Flow APIs. 

Enhanced support for flow variables, created automatically when a flow starts.  Flow variable values may even be sourced from a backing bean factory, benefiting from full dependeny injection there.  The exact scope of the variable is configurable.

A new flow execution redirect response type, for redirecting to a unique "flow execution URL".  Accessing a flow execution URL refreshes a  Flow at a previously entered ViewState, allowing continuation from there.  The URL remains valid while the conversation is active and the continuation point remains valid.  This allows for full use of back, next, refresh, and new window buttons without page caching.

Refinements in state exception handling, with convenient support for transition-executing state exception handlers.  The core transition element now supports a on-exception attribute that drives a transition to a new state on the occurrence of an exception.  For example:

Transition executing state exception handling 

... transitions the flow to the editAccount state if an AccountException is thrown by the placeOrder method.

Improvements in flow attribute mapping support.  Each flow may now be configured with an input-mapper to map input provided by callers that start the flow.  A flow may also be configured with an output-mapper to expose return values to callers who terminate the flow.  These enhancements allow a flow to be reused as a top-level flow and a subflow without change, as input and output attributes are mapped consistently for both cases.

Support for dynamic view name and target state expressions, allowing for convenient runtime-based calculation of ViewState's logical view name, and a transition's target state, respectively.

Enhanced JSF integration.  The JSF integration now supports the logical redirect response types including FlowExecutionRedirect, ConversationRedirect, FlowRedirect, and ExternalRedirect.  In addition, enhancements to the FlowPhaseListener allow for a flow execution to be launched and refreshed without having to go through a formal navigation step.  1.0 RC2 is expected to add further JSF convenience and official support with JSF in a Portlet environment.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES and WHERE TO START

Spring Web Flow 1.0 RC1 further refines the reference manual, providing 50 focused pages on SWF usage.  The manual is available on-line in HTML and PDF forms.

One of the best ways to get started with Spring Web Flow is to review and walkthrough the sample applications.  We recommend reviewing all samples, supplementing with reference manual material as needed from the start.  Nine (9) sample applications ship with the 1.0 RC1 release, each demonstrating a distinct set of product features.  These samples are:

1. Phonebook - the original sample demonstrating most features (including subflows).
2. Sellitem - demonstrates a wizard with conditional transitions, flow execution redirects, conversational scope, and continuations.
3. Flowlauncher - demonstrates all the possible ways to launch and resume flows.
4. Itemlist - demonstrates REST-style URLs, conversational redirects to a refreshable conversation URL, and inline flows.
5. Shippingrate - demonstrates Spring Web Flow together with Ajax technology (thanks to Steven Devijver)
5. NumberGuess - demonstrates stateful beans
6. Birthdate - demonstrates Struts integration.
7. Fileupload - demonstrates multipart file upload.
8. Phonebook-Portlet - the phonebook sample in a Portlet environment (notice how the flow definitions do not change)
9. Sellitem-JSF - the sellitem sample in a JSF environment (notice how the flow definition does not change)

To build the sample applications for deployment in one step simply extract the release archive, access the projects/build-spring-webflow directory and execute the ant dist target.  See the release readme.txt and projects/spring-webflow-samples/readme.txt for more information on the release archive contents and samples, respectively.  All sample projects are now Spring IDE projects, directly importable into Eclipse.  Watch for the Spring IDE Graphical Web Flow editor coming soon from the Spring IDE team.

Thanks to everyone out there who has made Spring Web Flow what it is today—those using it, providing the feedback that makes it stronger.  Enjoy!

Sincerely,

The Spring Web Flow Team

Keith Donald
Erwin Vervaet
Colin Sampaleanu
Juergen Hoeller
Rob Harrop

Spring IDE 1.3 Released

Releases | Torsten Juergeleit | April 25, 2006 | ...

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring IDE 1.3 has been released.

This release of Spring IDE provides some new features and a bunch of bugfixes. For a complete list visit http://springide.org/project/milestone/Release%201.3

Changes:

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

Use Eclipse's update manager to install this this release from the project's update site http://springide.org/updatesite/

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

Spring Framework 2.0 M4 Released

Releases | Juergen Hoeller | April 24, 2006 | ...

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

Acegi Security System for Spring 1.0.0-RC2 Released

Releases | Colin Sampaleanu | February 10, 2006 | ...

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

-----

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

Spring Framework 2.0 M2 released

Releases | Juergen Hoeller | February 02, 2006 | ...

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

Spring IDE 1.2.5 Released

Releases | Torsten Juergeleit | January 11, 2006 | ...

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

Spring Framework Training Summary (January)

Releases | Colin Sampaleanu | January 10, 2006 | ...

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

Spring Framework 2.0 M1 released

Releases | Rod Johnson | December 22, 2005 | ...

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.

Review the Spring 2.0 roadmap for information about upcoming milestones.

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