We're pleased to announce that Spring 1.2.2 has just been released. This is a bugfix and minor enhancement release. It also provides a unified basis for the upcoming Spring WebFlow release candidate.

Besides refinements in the JTA transaction synchronization and SQLException translation, this release introduces a variety of internal refactorings and new helper classes. Furthermore, support for JDK 1.5's XML-based properties format has been added to all relevant Spring classes.

We have also extended our reference documentation in various areas. Most importantly, it covers JDO, TopLink, OJB…

We're pleased to announce that Spring 1.2.1 has just been released. This is a bugfix and refinement release, addressing a number of issues found in 1.2 final.

Furthermore, the PetClinic sample has been updated to serve as showcase for JMX export: the JDBC version exposes a cache refresh operation and a call monitor via JMX now.

We'd like to encourage all Spring 1.2 RC/final users to upgrade to Spring 1.2.1, in particular if using the Hibernate3 integration.

For complete details on changes and bug fixes, please see the change log.

FYI, a 1.2.2 release is scheduled for late June, introducing various minor new features. See our JIRA for details.

Spring Web Flow PR3 has been released. Here's Keith's mailing list announcement: 

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Dear Spring Community,

I’m pleased to announce the release of Spring Web Flow Preview 3.  This is a major new release with a substantial number of new features: both in terms of power and convenience.  This release is considered stable for development use.

To download, access: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=73357&package_id=148517

Note: there are a few incompatible changes between PR2 and PR3.  For a listing and a porting guide, access the change log here: http://opensource.atlassian.com/confluence/spring/display/WEBFLOW/Change+Log

Contained within this release are a number of new and noteworthy enhancements.  Here are some of them:

View State Enhancements

• Each view state may now be configured with one or more setup actions.  This action is executed after the state is entered but before control is returned to the client for response rendering.  This reduces (and in many cases eliminates) the need for setup action states, making for more concise flow definitions.
• Each view state may now select the view to render and all supporting model data in a fully dynamic, pluggable fashion using the new ViewDescriptorCreator strategy.
• Powerful redirect expressions are now supported, with full-support for resolving redirect parameters in a dynamic fashion from the flow RequestContext.

Setup actions:

 <view-state id="displayCriteria" view="criteriaView">
            <setup bean="searchFormAction" method="setupForm"/>
            <transition on="submit" to="executeQuery">
                  <action bean="searchFormAction" method="bindAndValidate"/>
            </transition>
</view-state>

Redirect expressions:

<end-state id="end" view="redirect:/myFlow.htm?input=${flowScope.input}"/>

Subflow Attribute Mapping Enhancements

• Subflow input and output mapping policies are now fully configurable via a XML flow definition.
• Expressions may also be specified that resolve subflow input attribute values in a dynamic fashion.

For example:

<attribute-mapper>
            <input value="${sourceEvent.parameters.id}" as="id" type="long"/>
</attribute-mapper>

The expression language used is also pluggable – by default web flow will try OGNL, if it’s not found on the classpath it’ll use Spring’s BeanWrapper.

Annotated Definition Objects

• In addition to action execution parameters, each core definition object in the system--Flow, State, and Transition---can now be annotated with arbitrary property metadata.  Such properties are specifiable in the webflow xml definition using the “property” element, with full support for from-string type conversion with convenient type aliasing.

For example:

<transition on="submit" to="executeQuery">
            <property name="submitPressed" value="true" type="boolean"/>
</transition>

In this case this ‘submitPressed’ boolean property would be made available to this transition’s target state after entering for reasoning.

Enhanced Flow Execution Listener Callbacks

• Listeners responding to the lifecycle of an executing flow now have more hooks to insert custom logic—notification now happens when a flow is starting, started, paused, resumed, entering a new state, entered a new state, or ended---with veto capability for proposed flow state changes (to facilitate state precondition checks, for example).

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These are just some of the new features of this release.  For a full list of changes, see http://opensource.atlassian.com/confluence/spring/display/WEBFLOW/Change+Log

As always, we very much value your feedback.  One or two more PR releases to go and we’ll be at 1.0 final!

Cheers,

Keith Donald
Erwin Vervaet

Christian Dupuis has announced a new preview version of the Eclipse-based Spring-IDE which has graphical editor support for Spring Web Flow.

Here's Christian's announcement from the mailing list:

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Dear Spring Community,

We have just released the first preview version of the Spring IDE WebFlow support. Please use this release to give us feedback.

Features:

* Full featured graphical editor for String WebFlow Xml  configurations files.
   - Support for latest Spring WebFlow PR 3 features
   - Drag'n'Drop editing
   - Validation during edit
   - Print and Export (jpg and bmp) functionality
   - Automated lay outing of Spring WebFlow config file including connection routing
   - Side-by-side editing of the same configuration file in
     your favorite Xml Editor Plugin and in the WebFlow Editor
* Integration with Spring IDE Beans View and Beans Graph
   - Beans ConfigSet can be associated with a WebFlow ConfigSet for validation

The Preview Release 1 is available from Spring IDE's developer update site at http://springide.org/updatesite_dev. Make sure you have installed Eclipse 3.0 along with Spring IDE 1.2.0 and GEF 3.0.1.

Documentation is available at
http://springide.org/project/wiki/WebFlowEditor and
http://springide.org/project/wiki/WebFlowEditorUsage.

If you find any bugs or you have feature requests please file a ticket at  http://springide.org/project/newticket specifying the version 'webflow.PR1'.

Thanks for your effort

Greetings Christian

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring IDE v1.2 has been released.

Version 1.2 is a port to Eclipse 3 with a bunch of bugfixes. For a complete list of bugfixes included
visit http://springide.org/project/milestone/Release%201.2

• Ported to Eclipse 3.0
• Added support for Eclipse 3.1M7
• Updated to Spring v1.2
• Refactored generic stuff (e.g. model, project nature + action, incremental project builder, ...) into separate plugins (org.springframework.ide.eclipse.core and org.springframework.ide.eclipse.ui)
• add change notification and visitor support to generic model
• beans model now extends generic model defined in new plugin org.springframework.ide.eclipse.beans.core
• all jars moved from org.springframework.ide.eclipse.beans.core to new plugin org.springframework.ide.eclipse.core

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/

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

On this lucky Friday the 13th, we are pleased to announce that Spring 1.2 final has just been released.

(Thanks to Juergen for doing the packaging and his usual coding heroics). 

The major new features since 1.2 RC2 are:

• TopLink support (for both TopLink 9.0.4 and 10.1.3)
• JDO 2.0 support (tested against JPOX 1.1 beta 3)
• Hibernate 3.0.3 support (aggressive release of Connections)

The overall major new features of Spring 1.2 are:

• finer-grained distribution jar files
• simplified XML bean definitions
• JMX support
• JDK 1.5 transaction annotation
• support for WebLogic JTA extensions
• JDBC RowSet support
• JCA CCI support
• JDO2 support
• Hibernate3 support
• TopLink support

Thanks to Oracle for donating the original TopLink support prototype,  and in particular to Jim Clark from Oracle - for all his help in getting the TopLink support into its final shape!

For details on new features, deprecations and bug fixes, please see the change log.

FYI, we have a 1.2.1 release scheduled for June, featuring minor enhancements that did not make 1.2 final. See our JIRA road map for details.

We are pleased to announce that Spring Modules 0.1 has just been released.

Downloads can be found at: http://springmodules.dev.java.net.

This release includes:

• Integration with HiveMind, allowing for HiveMind services to be exposed as Spring beans
• Spring-style integration classes for JSR-94 rules engines such as Jess and Drools
• Spring-style configuration for OSWorkflow
• Integration classes for Commons Validator (taken from Spring sandbox)

The HiveMind and Commons Validator support classes are considered to be stable and ready for use in production. Modifications to the JavaScripthandling in Commons Validator will appear in 0.2.

We have successfully used the JSR-94 integration classes in a production setting, but are planning to overhaul session handling in 0.2.

The full roadmap can be found at: http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/spring/secure/BrowseProject.jspa?id=10030&amp;report=roadmap.

We're pleased to announce that Spring 1.2 RC2 has just been released.

• support for JCA's Common Client Interface (CCI), including support for CCI local transactions

• deprecated ListableBeanFactory's getBeanDefinitionNames(type)", in favor of "getBeanNamesForType"
  
• added "value"/"value-ref" shortcut attributes to XML "entry" tag for maps
  
• added "alias" root element for XML bean definition files, for aliases for beans in other files
  
  
• JdbcAccessor lazily initializes the SQLExceptionTranslator by default now
  
• added further configuration options to LocalSessionFactoryBean for Hibernate3
  
• added "defaultDestinationName" property to JmsTemplate, for a dynamic default destination
  
  
• refined Resource support for compatibility with JDK 1.3's classic VM and with JRockit's jar paths
  
• refactored static PathMatcher class into PathMatcher interface and AntPathMatcher implementation
  
• added ConfigurableMimeFileTypeMap, with extensive MIME type mappings out-of-the-box
  
  
• added "context.i18n" package, with LocaleContext abstraction and global LocaleContextHolder
  
• DispatcherServlet exposes the current LocaleResolver through the global LocaleContextHolder
  
• added RemoteInvocationTraceInterceptor, logging remote calls and exceptions on the server
  
  
• updated JasperReports support for JR 0.6.6, using JRDefaultCompiler as default report compiler
  
• reworked AbstractJasperReportsView to work on JasperPrint instance rather than JasperReport instance
  
• added support for reports with embedded SQL statements to AbstractJasperReportsView

We are pleased to announce the 2nd preview release of Spring Web Flow for use with the Spring 1.2 release path.  This stable-for-development-use release offers the following major new features:

• Pluggable flow execution storage strategies, with out-of-the-box continuations support.  This means:
  • You now have the option to persist an executing flow’s state to any backing data store, including the HttpSession (the default), a database, serialized files, etc.
  • You can select to use a continuations based storage strategy, turning Spring Web Flow into a continuation-driven system providing proper browser navigational button behavior (back, next, refresh, and new window.) You can also choose between client-side or server-side continuation storage.  GZIP compression of flow execution state is also supported.
• Support for OGNL transition criteria, with a TransitionCriteriaCreator strategy for easily integrating other expression languages or custom transition expressions as needed.
• Portlet support, with the samples (Phonebook) illustrating Spring Web Flow in a portlet environment.
• Support for a ‘validatorMethod’ action state property, specifying a validation method to invoke, for use with a FormAction with a configured Validator instance (to support easy piecemeal validation within a wizard)
• Support for JDK 1.3.
• Samples (Phonebook) illustrating how to write integration tests to verify the expected behavior of your flows.
• Samples (Birthdate) illustrating Struts integration.
• A brand new sample app (Sell Item), illustrating a validating wizard using continuations (providing proper browser navigational button use!) and conditional transitions (using OGNL expressions!).

There are also a number of bug fixes and other general improvements/polishing included in this release.  Note, for PR1 users: there are a few incompatible changes in PR2 with PR1.  Please see the Change Log on the WIKI for details.

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As always, with the Spring seal of quality you’ve come to expect, we offer:

• Quality documentation, both in the javadocs and WIKI docs
  
• Strong test coverage
  
• Careful attention to naming, packaging, and ease of use
  
• Exceptional error reporting
• A feature set driven by end user needs

To download the preview release:

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1. Access the springframework project file list.
   

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2. Scroll down to the 'spring-webflow' release package and select

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