If you aren't following the SpringSource blog you may have missed it, but last week Juergen Hoeller announced the availability of the second milestone for Spring 3.0. Juergen's blog post covers all of the details about the milestone including the new RestTemplate, early JPA 2.0 support, more Java 5 style API updates and other improvements.

You can always get the latest milestones, release candidates and full releases for Spring from the download center.

Introduction

In this blog post I will show you how to create a loosely coupled and scalable application with Spring Integration and dm Server. The added benefit of using OSGi will allow us to change the behavior of the application at runtime and of course we're going to have some fun with that too. First I will quickly highlight the reasons for designing an application for concurrent use, then I will describe different strategies of integrating OSGi bundles with Messaging. Along the way you will get a glimpse of our tooling and some of the dm Server features. You should be able to do this yourself, if you…

We are pleased to announce that the second Spring 3.0 milestone is finally available (download page). This release comes with a wealth of revisions and new features:

Further Java 5 style API updates: consistent use of generic Collections and Maps, consistent use of generified FactoryBeans, and also consistent resolution of bridge methods in the Spring AOP API. Generified ApplicationListeners automatically receive specific event types only. All callback interfaces such as TransactionCallback and HibernateCallback declare a generic result value now. Overall, the Spring core codebase is now…

Due to the extensive travel schedule of yours truly, we haven't had a meet up since last September. It's been almost half a year, so it's about time for another one.

But, before we move on, I'd like to make point out a new Google Group that we have set up, to keep you posted about this. I received a lot of requests to set up a mailing list over the past few years, so from now on, the main place to keep an eye on, for new Java Meetup dates, is the Java Meetup Google Group. Sign up there to get the dates delivered right to your inbox.

Okay, on to the details for the next meetup:

• When: March 13th 2009
• Where: De Jaren - Nieuwe Doelenstraat, Amsterdam (map, below)
• Time: starting 5.30pm
• What: drinks and chats, about... well, everything

From Central…

My 13 year old son has been programming in Lua, TI Basic and Assembler, ActionScript, JavaScript, and he's into C++/Dark GDK these days. While I've mostly focused on Java for the past few years, I've programmed in a wide range of statically typed and dynamically typed languages.

Since my son is just starting his programming journey, I naturally wondered:

What are the most popular programming languages these days?

I used tiobe.com and langpop.com to answer this question. Both sites provide programming language popularity statistics and rankings, and I was happy to see that Java, C, and C++ rank…

The Spring Integration 1.0 GA release was announced 2 months ago at SpringOne Americas, and ever since I've been meaning to write a new, up-to-date "getting started" blog post. Well, the beginning of the year is always a busy time, so my goal is to provide a hands-on example with 10 steps. Each step should take roughly one minute... unless you stop to think ;). So, without further ado, here we go!

Step 1: Download the Spring Integration distribution

You can grab the latest version (1.0.1 at the time I'm writing this) here: http://www.springsource.com/download/community?project=Spring%20Integration

Once the download completes, unzip the file…

Dear Spring Community,

We are delighted to announce the availability of Spring LDAP 1.3.0.RELEASE. This is a major release, containing more than 50 fixes compared to the 1.2.1 version; modifications varying in importance from internal modifications and minor fixes to important bug fixes and and significant functionality additions.

Most importantly we now provide a means to perform simple LDAP authentication directly in LdapTemplate. Other useful improvements include TLS connection support, referral handling improvements, as well as a couple of important fixes working around problems in the underlying Java JNDI API. As always, refer to the Change Log for a complete list of the changes included in this version.

Download | API Docs | Reference Docs

About the Spring LDAP Project
For more information on the Spring LDAP project, refer to the project home. Comments and support requests should be posted to the Spring LDAP support forum. Bugs and feature requests should be reported to the Jira issue tracker.

Enjoy!
Mattias Arthursson & Ulrik Sandberg,
Spring LDAP Project Team

On March 10th we will do the first Spring Expert Day in Germany!

Subjects and Speakers include:

• Spring 3.0 - Jürgen Höller (VP & Distinguished Engineer, Spring Framework Project Lead)
• SpringSource dm Server - Next Generation Application Server (Eberhard Wolff, Principal Consultant, Regional Director)
• Web Applications and more with Spring (Agim Emruli, Senior Consultant)
• Spring Security Advanced (Mike Wiesner, Senior Consultant)
• Development tools for Spring and OSGi (Christian Dupuis, Principal Software Engineer, Spring IDE & SpringSource Tool Suite Lead)
• Management of Spring Applications with SpringSource AMS (Agim Emruli, Senior Consultant)
• Question and Answer

The event costs 90€ and includes lunch.

For registration and more details go to http://springmuenchen.eventbrite.com/

A fairly common question that I get from time to time is how to go about using JDK specific classes inside an OSGi environment. To some degree, this is equivalent to getting access to the bootstrapping classpath from OSGi, without bundling it. To express package dependencies, bundles use the OSGi directive inside their manifests - mainly Export-Package and Import-Package for providing and demanding, a respectively, a class package dependency. Defining a bundle wiring is a crucial step for creating a modular application; however there are cases, as the issue above, where the needed package is…