The Java EE 6 proposal (JSR 316) was published today. I believe that this will be the most important revision of the platform since it was released nearly 10 years ago, and that it should be welcomed by users of the technology. Interface21 is happy to be a supporter of this JSR, and I am looking forward to contributing to it.

Java EE (known as J2EE for most of its history) has played a valuable role in creating a market for Java middleware. However, over those 10 years, important issues have emerged with the platform, such as:

• The need for a Java EE compliant server to be bloated with a range of functionality that is of little interest to the vast majority of users
• The fact that enterprise requirements have changed since J2EE was envisaged and that a "one size fits all model" is less and less appropriate
• The fact that enterprise Java has been greatly strengthened by the emergence of frameworks (especially in open source) that make developers more productive and their production applications more efficient and maintainable
• New challenges such as Ruby on Rails, and even .NET, showing that, in a time of rapid change and innovation, a cosy 2-3 year release cycle imperils the entire platform

Java EE 6 is an important revision of the platform that has the…

Michael Hickins recently published a piece on eWeek entitled Is Open Source Dying? The title drew me in, and no doubt plenty of other folk too. But the article doesn't prove the case, although it contains some interesting points that merit discussion.

Most of the article concerns speculation about the experience of government with open source, and the motives of vendors such as IBM. I prefer to judge companies and individuals by their actions, rather than speculation about their motives, and there is plenty of evidence that IBM, for example, takes open source very seriously. There's plenty of…

After fixing approximately 250 bugs and working uncountable hours on adding support for Spring 2.0, Spring Web Flow, Spring AOP and Spring JavaConfig, we are proud to announce the immediate availability of Spring IDE 2.0.

Download | Documentation | Changelog

The release is available from our release update site. Spring IDE 2.0 is licensed under the terms of the Eclipse Public License - v1.0.

New Features

Spring IDE 2.0 contains lots of new features and a bunch of bug fixes. A list of all closed tickets is available in our ticketing system. For those of you that are not familiar with recent development of Spring IDE here is a short list of features included:

• Support for Spring 2.0 namespace-based configurations. We have put lots of work into that to make the support as extensible as possible. You can read more about that in another post.
• Support for Spring Web Flow, including an extension to WTP’s XML editor for content assist and hyperlinking as well as validation and graphical editing. More information is available here.
• Tools for Spring AOP based development. This includes support for validating configurations (parsing of pointcut expressions) and visualization of cross cutting references based on <aop:config> and @AspectJ-style aspects.
• Support for Spring JavaConfig M2. This serves as sandbox for testing the extension points of Spring IDE’s core. Read more about that here and here.
• Usability and UI improvements: A new Spring Explorer that replaces the Beans View, Content contribution to the Eclipse’s Project Explorer, a Spring Working Set type to reduce cluttering in the Project and Spring Explorer, Refactoring participants for rename and move refactorings of Java Packages and Classes as well as Bean names, New Project and Spring Bean configuration file wizard.

Spring IDE 2.0 is compatible with upcoming Eclipse 3.3 (aka Eclipse Europa).

Read more at the Spring IDE Blog.

I was reading an article by Vigil Bose on TSS the other day and saw the usage of the HibernateDaoSupport class. Since this is no longer a recommended way of using Hibernate from Spring, I thought I might as well just blog about it another time.

With the advent of Spring 2.0, it has become possible to start using the Hibernate Session API directly again. The question is whether or not it is wise to abandon the use of the HibernateTemplate when working with Hibernate, or any other template-based approaches Spring features.

Using Spring XxxTemplates

Acquisition of connection: If transaction synchronization is active…

As promised to everyone in my sessions, here are all the code samples that I presented during the conference.

Concurrency and Spring JMX Dynamic Languages

Slides will be available from the SpringOne web site.

Last week at SpringOne, Alef and I gave a talk on dealing with complex applications using Spring. Complexity in this case was considered both at the structural and dynamic level. As for the structural part of the talk, I covered that one in my previous blog posting. The dynamic part explained some possible solutions to deal with differences between your deployment environments. (testing, acceptance, production, etc.) A lot of people asked me if I could provide them with the source of the demonstrations I gave during the talk. I've attached the sources to this blog entry and will explain…

In the last session of SpringOne yesterday, Dave Syer, Scott Wintermute, Lucas Ward and Wayne Lund all presented on Spring Batch. I didn't actually attend (since I had an early cab ride), but I stuck my head in and was yet again astounded by the amount of interest.

Back at JavaOne we had an immense amount of interest in this solution as well, with plenty of visitors calling by the booth to quiz us about batch.

It's all too easy in this world of Ajax and Rich Internet Applications to forget that a large number (a majority maybe?) of large scale enterprise applications are batch-oriented. Batch…

Load testing a Web Flow application is similar to load testing any other web application – we'll use a load testing tool to simulate increasing levels of concurrent client access in order to capture essential performance statistics.

With Web Flow there will be a couple of important considerations for the load test:

1. The load test must maintain independent “cookie storage area” so each client request can carry an independent HTTP session.
2. We need a mechanism for extracting the unique flow execution key from the initial response and use it to customize subsequent requests in the same flow session.

Apache JMeter is an open-source performance test tool that can satisfy both considerations.

For 1) we add an HTTP Cookie Manager element at the root of each Test Group exercising Web Flow functionality. The Cookie Manager ensures each simulated client request can have its own…

SpringOne is humming along nicely. This year it's a 3 day show, up from 2 days last year, and once again it's great to see hundreds of attendees at a Spring conference. For once I'm quite relaxed at a show, as after the opening keynote I have no further sessions, and don't need to work on slides.

Right now, Adrian is preparing to make a major announcement about Spring tooling. Well actually he's giving a uniquely personal take on duck typing, as I'm sure you'll hear...

More about that later, but first I need to share some news from yesterday. I was happy to be able to announce that we have…