If the tech community were to host their own version of the popular TV show The Biggest Loser (or maybe Celebrity Fit Club) you would see enterprise Java front and center---bloated, overweight, tired, and drained.

The future of enterprise Java is becoming clear. The morbidly obese legacy platforms are in decline, with leaner solutions increasingly used in production as well as in development. Legacy technologies such as EJB are becoming less and less relevant.The lukewarm takeup of Java EE 5 leaves it looking increasingly like the last gasp of traditional J2EE bloatware. Meanwhile, the Java EE 6 specification is finally set to allow for greater modularity, in a radical change which will have important implications for developers and is likely to rejuvenate competition among implementations. As the standards and the products based upon them have gathered pound after pound of cellulite, SOA, Web 2.0 and other infrastructural changes continually impose new requirements that were not foreseen…

It's been a while... for the Amsterdam Java Meetup that is. I've been traveling a lot and haven't been able to organize another meetup past quarter. But here we go again: the (almost) quarterly Amsterdam Java Meetup with free drinks (or at least, the first few rounds) will be hosted in grand-cafe de Jaren in Amsterdam (see below for more info on the location) on the 23rd of May. You can expect many Java devs (usually between 50 and 80 people turn up), technical as well as non-technical discussions and of course, the latest gossip in the Dutch Java industry. We'd love to hear from people from…

Dear Spring community,

I'm pleased to announce that Spring Framework 2.5.3 has been released!  Download | Documentation

This is the third update release in the Spring 2.5 series. It fixes issues reported since 2.5.2 and introduces various enhancements, such as:

• @Autowired and @Required annotations interact more intuitively
• ControllerClassNameHandlerMapping detects @Controller beans by default
• "bean(...)" pointcut designator matches against bean aliases as well
• Spring 2.5 "jee:*" config elements use resource-ref="true" by default
• new CachingConnectionFactory for JMS session and producer pooling
• new DB…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring .NET 1.1.1 has been released.  

Download | Site | Documentation | Changelog

This is primarily a bugfix and enhancement release but some minor new features were introduced:

• ParameterValidationAdvice to validate method arguments.
• A Required attribute and RequiredObjectFactoryPostProcessor for enforcing the configuration of required properties.
• ASP.NET Panel control to disable DI on…

Dear Spring community,
We are pleased to announce that Spring Integration 1.0.0.M3 has been released.
Download | Reference Documentation | JavaDoc

To see a list of the new features and improvements since Milestone 2, view the changelog. For more information, visit the Spring Integration Home.

Mark Fisher
Spring Integration Lead

Dear Spring community,
We are pleased to announce that Spring Batch 1.0.0.FINAL has been released!

Downloads | Site | Changelog | Announcement

There are no significant high-level changes since rc1, except some updates to the reference documentation. The main functional changes were that retry and skip can now be used in the same step, and there are some extra configuration options for fatal exceptions in the step factory beans.

Spring Security 2.0.0 RC1 is now available.

Download | Changelog | Announcement

Over 65 issues have been addressed, including OpenID integration, a new "protect-pointcut" for AspectJ expressions, dynamic retrieval of method authorization metadata, support for method authorization on all method types (interface, class, bridge, generic, superclass), restful URI authorization, namespace improvements, dependency updates and much more!

It has been a busy few months since SpringSource partnered with Hyperic to bring our Application Management Suite (AMS) product to market. I am pleased to announce that the SpringSource AMS beta release is now available to all. Please take a moment to evaluate the software and post your thoughts on the beta forum. We are committed to providing the best application management experience possible for Spring-powered applications, and your feedback is much appreciated!

Those who expressed an interest in SpringSource AMS at The Spring Experience in December received an email announcing the beta…

After being in the works for about six months, I'm happy to announce that Spring Web Services 1.5.0 has been released! In this post, I'd like to go over some of the major new features.

New Transports

The 1.5 release includes two new transports: JMS and email. Using these new transports requires no Java code changes: just add a bit of configuration, and you're off! The JMS transport integrates nicely with Spring 2's Message-Driven POJO model, as indicated by the following piece of configuration taken from the airline sample application:

<jms:listener-container connection-factory="connectionFactory">
  <jms…