No, that's not my headline, it's actually the title of a white paper recently published by Open SOA collaboration. To quote from the news announcement accompanying the whitepaper:

"Based upon user feedback, the OSOA Collaboration are publishing a white paper highlighting the powerful combination of the SCA, Spring and OSGi technologies aimed to help Developers simplify the creation and composition of services critical to building applications based on an SOA approach."

The white paper provides a short overview of SCA, OSGi and Spring, and then describes how they can be used together. Quoting from the summary:

"SCA, OSGi and Spring are all useful and powerful facilities for the Java programmer to use. In the new service-oriented world that we are entering, using SCA, OSGi and Spring together provide powerful capabilities for building service implementations from sets of simple Java Beans using few APIs, with managed dependencies, version control and dynamic update capabilities, allied to the capability to compose those implementations with other service components written in Java or in other languages and existing in a distributed network of systems using a range of communication methods.

Simplicity, flexibility, manageability, testability, reusability. A key combination for enterprise developers."

In a previous post, I described how we use a custom ANT task to upload nightly snapshots from the ANT based projects in the Spring portfolio. In this post I'll describe how we use Amazon S3 to generate pages for the snapshots from each project and allow users to download the snapshots.

As I mentioned in the previous post, S3 is primarily used as a REST-ful service. This means that while I used Java for the upload portion, I was free to use other languages for the download portion. I chose to use PHP in this case because it was already available on the server I was working with, and was the…

One of the interesting side effects of a solid CI structure is that when things are running reliably, new problems start to crop up. Shortly after Spring's CI system started running smoothly, our occasional space and bandwidth issues on static.springframework.org became more pronounced. Colin Sampaleanu had done research earlier on how to alleviate some of these problems and had settled on Amazon S3.

Amazon S3 is part of the Amazon Web Services umbrella and provides an incredibly cheap online file storage service. What does 'incredibly cheap' mean? Well, from the website, it appears that…

This happened in Atlanta last week while I was in a Barnes & Noble bookstore. I circled around to the computer section and began scanning titles. With my head tilted I overheard a conversation about a job. I wasn't actively listening but I knew one side was pitching a job while the other was inquiring about it.

A couple of minutes later it was just me and the guy who was looking for talent. I was sure he would start speaking. Soon after he said 'so you're in J2EE?' and so the conversation began. He asked me about my work. He didn't know about Interface21 but upon hearing it's the company…

Following up on my post on WS-DuckTyping, I thought it would be interesting to show what support Spring Web Services offers for XPath. Some of these features are available right now, but most will be part of the RC1 release we will release later this month. Throughout this post I will be using the contacts xml file defined in item 35 of Effective XML, by Rusty Harold.

XPathExpression

Recently, I've added the XPathExpressionFactoryBean, to make it easier to inject XPath expressions into your beans, like so:

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/200…

Spring Web Flow, much like the Spring Framework itself, is a unique integration technology. Most of our users view it as a generic ApplicationController that can be embedded in any environment. We support Servlet and Portlet based applications, and ship integration with the leading web frameworks Struts, Spring MVC, and Java Server Faces. There are even teams I know of using Spring Web Flow in a Flex environment. In each of these environments, Spring Web Flow integrates to provide a better model for implementing navigation logic and managing application state.

Our users like this because…

Over the last couple of weeks, fellow i21 employee Costin Leau and I have been working on improving the Continuous Integration processes of the Spring projects. When we started, we had separate builds running in Cruise Control, Continuum, and even a custom cron job. We were having some trouble getting any of our existing tools to give us what we wanted on all of the builds, when both Costin and I independently came upon Atlassian's new product Bamboo.

In about 10 minutes we had the Spring CI build up and running. This might not sound like much, but due to its size Spring doesn't play nicely…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring Web Flow 1.0.2 has been released.  This is a bugfix and enhancement release, addressing all bugs reported against the Spring Web Flow 1.0 series and significantly enhancing Spring Web Flow's support for users of Java Server Faces (JSF).  We recommend upgrading to this release from previous versions.

Spring Web Flow is a next generation Java web application controller framework.  The framework provides a powerful system for implementing navigation logic and managing application state consistently across a variety of environments.

New and Noteworthy in this Release

Spring Web Flow 1.0.2 is a solid, stable release that serves as a drop-in replacement for existing users and also contains several noteworthy enhancements.  Three of these enhancements are particularly worth noting in more detail:

Significantly enhanced JSF integration

Now when used as a JSF extension, Spring Web Flow provides:

• A NavigationHandler that brings the full power of the Web Flow navigation system to JSF developers.  This system allows for implementing dynamic navigation rules and solves the infamous back-button problem out-of-the-box.
  
• A state management system providing UI Components full access to beans managed in any of Web Flow's conversational data scopes, including "conversation", "flow", and "flash" scope.  These scopes complement JSF's default scopes and are particularly useful for interactive web applications that apply Ajax techniques using libraries such as Ajax4JSF.
  
• Native support for all major JSF view technologies.  With Spring Web Flow 1.0.2, views that participate in flows are standard JSF views whether they are built using JSP or Facelets.  Any JSF UI Component can now bind to beans managed in any of the conversational scopes seamlessley.

Please run and review the sellitem-jsf sample for a quick assessment of these enhancements in action.  They significantly improve the ease of using Spring Web Flow in a JSF environment, and are the start of a larger effort that will continue into the 1.1 release and beyond.

Expanded practical documentation

Complete walk-throughs of each of Spring Web Flow's sample applications are now provided in the reference manual.  These walk-throughs take you through the implementation of each sample, and explain best practices and design considerations along the way.   After downloading the release, see the 'Practical' chapter for how to get the sample applications running inside your IDE.

Spring IDE 2.0 integration

The upcoming 2.0 version of the Spring IDE Eclipse Plugin features a Graphical Web Flow Editor and XML Flow Definition Editor.  Beginning with Spring Web Flow 1.0.2, each of the sample applications has been Spring IDE 2.0 enabled, allowing you to easily assess these tools as they progress.  To evaluate Spring IDE 2.0 simply import the sample projects into Eclipse and install the latest version of the Spring IDE 2.0 plugin from the nightly update site.

Spring Web Flow 1.1 Road Map 

Work has begun on Spring Web Flow 1.1 in anticipation of a first release candidate becoming available at JavaOne.  Building on 1.0.2, this release will offer major new functionality including support for conversational persistence contexts, Acegi Security integration, unified EL integration, integrated Spring 2.0 custom scopes, enhanced support for Java-based flows, and support for flow composition and inheritance.

Special thanks to Jeremy Grelle, Rossen Stoyanchev, and Christian Dupuis for their major contributions to this release.  It is an exciting time to be a part of the Web Flow community!

Keith Donald - Interface21
Erwin Vervaet - Ervacon
Leads, Spring Web Flow Development 

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring 2.0.4 has been released.  This is a bugfix and enhancement release, addressing all reported bugs against the Spring 2.0 series and introducing significant performance improvements.  We recommend upgrading to Spring 2.0.4 from previous 2.0.x releases.

Regarding the performance improvements, repeated creation of Spring bean instances is up to 12 times faster in this release than previous versions of Spring 2.0. AspectJ-based weaving performance has also increased by a significant factor.

Please see the changelog and JIRA roadmap for all the details of the 77 issues addressed in this release.

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