Spring Security 2.0.2 is now available.

• Download | Changelog | Announcement | Web Site
  

Spring Security 2.0.2 is mainly a bugfix release and upgrading is recommended for users of earlier versions. There are also some minor extensions to the security namespace to support additional configuration options requested by the community.

In this article I will show you how to run a Spring Batch job in the SpringSource Application Platform. I ran an early version of this up as a little demo for JavaOne, and then again at the London Spring User Group, and thought it might be a good thing to share. The sample code is here.

The Bundles

First we'll do a quick tour of the bundles in the sample code. Start the server now, or at any point after you have installed some bundles.

Bundle: hsql-server

This one is useful to have around for development and testing. All it does is launch an instance of HSQLDB in server mode, so that you can connect to it and inspect the database using SQL statements. You can just drag and drop it into the Platform Server instance in the Servers View. Do this first, because the Platform remembers the order in which bundles were installed, and starts them in that order. This one has to be started first because other bundles will try to connect to the database server.

The bundle configuration is in META-INF/spring/module-context.xml (this is conventional for Platform bundles) - Spring DM picks up all XML files from META-INF/spring. This one just uses Spring to configure and launch an instance of the HSQL Server.

There is an integration test that can be used to check the…

As an open source software provider, we think we should be open about our strategy, too. We'd like to share how we got here, where we're going and why the journey will be good for Spring, good for Spring users and good for SpringSource.

Our History

The Spring story began in 2001, when I began working on the 30,000 lines of framework code I published along with Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development in 2002. My objective was to help others to avoid the pitfalls that I had encountered completing J2EE projects since 1999.

It quickly became clear that others liked the ideas in that code - such as Dependency Injection and the Spring data access abstraction - and benefited from putting them into practice. I was approached by readers who requested that I publish the code and who wanted to contribute.

I quickly came to see some important benefits of open source.

• Most users get the functionality they need for free

    	<li> It…

Dear Spring community,
We are pleased to announce that Spring Integration 1.0.0.M4 is now available.
Download | Reference Documentation | JavaDoc

To see a list of issues resolved since Milestone 3, view the changelog. For more information, visit the Spring Integration Home.

Mark Fisher
Spring Integration Lead

After my talk on Spring Integration I've been getting quite some questions on clarification and samples. To meet the demand I will start a small series on implementing different integration patterns using Spring Integration. This first article will focus on the basics. It will show you how to get up and running and walk through one of the samples.

If you never heard about Spring Integration before it might be a good idea to familiarize yourself with it reading the introductory blog Mark Fisher wrote about it or by browsing the project website. In general

Let me start with a disclaimer: the…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce general availability of Spring Web Flow 2. Download | Documentation

Spring Web Flow is the project in the Spring Portfolio that focuses on providing the infrastructure for building and running rich web applications. As a Spring project, Web Flow builds on the Spring Web MVC framework to provide:

• A domain-specific-language for defining reusable controller modules called flows
• An advanced controller engine for managing conversational state
• First-class support for using Ajax to construct rich user interfaces
• First-class support for using JavaServerFaces with Spring

The modules of the Web Flow 2 distribution and their relationship with the Spring Framework are illustrated below:

What's in Web Flow 2

 

Spring Web MVC

The Spring Web MVC framework, a module of the Spring Framework distribution, provides the foundation for developing web applications with Spring using the proven ModelViewController paradigm. Each of the modules of the Web Flow distribution builds on this foundation.

Spring Web Flow

The Web Flow module is a MVC extension that allows you to define Controllers using a domain-specific-language. This language is designed to model user interactions that require several requests into the server to complete, or may be invoked from different contexts.

Spring JavaScript

Spring JavaScript is a JavaScript abstraction framework that makes it easy to write unobtrusive JavaScript to progressively enhance a web page with behavior. The framework consists of a public JavaScript API along with an implementation that builds on the Dojo Toolkit. Spring.js aims to simplify the use of Dojo for common enterprise scenarios while retaining its full-power for advanced use cases.

Spring JavaScript can work with any server-side framework. The Web Flow 2 distribution includes convenient integration between Spring JavaScript and Spring Web MVC for processing Ajax requests.

Spring Faces

The Spring Faces module contains Spring's support for JavaServerFaces. This support allows you to use JSF as a View technology within a familiar Spring MVC and Web Flow Controller environment. With this architectural approach, you combine the benefits of the JSF UI component model with the benefits of a Web MVC architecture. Spring Faces also includes a lightweight component library built on Spring JavaScript for declaratively enabling Ajax and client-side validation behaviors in a progressive manner.

Themes of the Web Flow 2 Release

In addition to introducing the new Spring Faces and Spring Javascript modules, the Web Flow 2 release effort addresses two major themes: Integration and Simplicity.

Integration

Across each of the modules, the Web Flow 2 distribution adds a number of interesting integrations that allow you to enrich your web applications. These integrations support:

• Using Spring Security to secure your flows in a declarative manner
• Using Tiles for JSP page composition and Ajax partial-rendering
• When using JSF, using Facelets for page composition and layout
• When using JSF, using Apache Trindad and JBoss RichFaces component libraries
• Using the Dojo widget system in a progressive and unobtrusive manner; a manner that degrades gracefully if JavaScript is not available on the client

Simplicity

The flow definition language has been simplified tremendously in Web Flow 2 while becoming more powerful overall. These simplifications include:

• An appoximate 50% overall reduction in lines-of-code when comparing a version 2 flow definition with its version 1 equivalent (example: version 2 vs version 1)
• A concise syntax for invoking actions using an Expression Language (EL), with support for both the Unified EL and OGNL
• Declarative model binding and validation, with support for convention-over-configuration
• Support for reuse at both the flow and state levels using flow definition inheritance
• Enhanced modularity, allowing a flow and its dependent resources to be packaged together in a self-contained bundle

Release Notes

• Web Flow 2 requires Java 1.4 or greater and runs on all major Java EE platforms including Tomcat, Jetty, Websphere, WebLogic, and JBoss.

• Web Flow 2 requires Spring Framework 2.5.4 or greater.

• Web Flow 2 has been certified by SpringSource as "Platform Ready" and is fit to run on the SpringSource dm Server in OSGi-enabled web applications.

Getting Started

• Get started using Web Flow by downloading the release and walking through the reference applications. Supplement with the documentation as you go to familiarize yourself with the feature set.

• To get started using a build system such as Maven or Ant+Ivy, access Web Flow artifacts from the Maven Central Repository.

• To get started using Web Flow in an OSGi environment on the SpringSource Application Platform, download the platform and get Web Flow bundles from the SpringSource Enterprise Bundle Repository.

Additional Community Resources

• Read the interview with Keith Donald and Jeremy Grelle of SpringSource describing what's new in the Web Flow 2 distribution in more detail

• Watch the Ajaxian.com interview where the release and Spring JavaScript are discussed with Dion Almaer.

• Get involved with the Web Flow 2 community on the Spring Community Forums

• Explore Spring Web reference applications on-line. The Spring Travel application showcases the integrated Web Flow 2 feature set and is included in the distribution. The SpringSource Enterprise Bundle Repository is a real-world application in production built on Spring 2.5 and Spring Web Flow 2.0.

• If you are an existing Web Flow 1 user, review the migration guide to help in upgrading to Web Flow 2. The WebFlowUpgrader tool automates the conversion of your flows to the version 2 syntax

• Submit bug reports and requests for enhancement using the Web Flow issue tracker

• Track updates to the Web Flow source repository with Fisheye

• Checkout the Web Flow source code from the Spring Project SVN Repository

• Watch for upcoming articles on Web Flow 2 by subscribing to springframework.org

InfoQ has a discussion thread summarizing the reactions to the announcement of the SpringSource Application Plaform. Michael Burke asked a great question on that thread which can be paraphrased as "forgetting the hype surrounding OSGi, what benefits can I expect to see if I port an application currently packaged as an EAR to OSGi bundles?".

I started answering this question on the InfoQ thread, but my answer was growing too long for a comment so instead I'll address it here.

The question is a good one. The main difference you will see in an OSGi-based application versus a traditional JEE EAR-based application is improved modularity. So the question becomes, does this improved modularity bring me any benefits, and if so what are they? The book "Design Rules, The Power of Modularity" gives a very thorough treatment of the question. It's great background but I get that feeling that Michael may be looking for something a little less theoretical than what you'll find in that book…

One of the main advantages of the SpringSource Application Platform is its ability to provision dependencies on an as-needed basis. The benefits of this are two-fold: it ensures that the Platform's memory footprint is as small as possible and it allows applications to be deployed without encapsulating all of their dependencies in a monolithic deployment unit, e.g. a WAR file. To take advantage of these capabilities you will require an understanding of the Platform's provisioning repository and this blog intends to provide just that.

Where is the provisioning repository and how does it work?

By default the Platform's provisioning repository can be found in the repository directory at the root of the installation: As you can see, there are three main directories: bundles, installed and libraries. installed is for the Platform's internal use so we'll focus on the bundles and libraries directories here. Each contains a number of subdirectories to separate the different types of dependencies:

• ext contains external dependencies that are provided with the Platform but are not part of the Platform itself.
• subsystems contains all of the subsystems that comprise the Platform.
• usr is initially empty and is intended to contain user-added dependencies, i.e. anything upon which your applications depend that is not already provided by the Platform.

The Platform searches the repository directory structure for both bundles and libraries during its initial startup. I'll talk about how this searching can be configured later on in this entry. As bundles and libraries are found within the repository, details of their symbolic names, exported packages etc. are added to an in-memory index of the repository. Upon completing the scan the in-memory indexes are cached to disk. Minimising the Platform's startup time was a priority for us during development. This caching allows the Platform to save some time during startup: it can skip the scan unless it detects that the contents of the repository have changed.

Runtime provisioning

In a plain OSGi environment a bundle's dependencies can only be satisfied by other bundles which have already been installed in the environment. For example, installing and starting a bundle that imports the org.apache.commons.dbcp package will fail if no bundle which exports that package has already been installed. This can be a real pain for users as they have to manually install all of a bundle's dependencies. Thankfully, the SpringSource Application Platform improves upon this significantly by dynamically installing dependencies on an as-needed basis.

When a deployed application is started by the Platform its…

It's been great to hear so much discussion on the SpringSource Application Platform, online and on the floor here at JavaOne. One of the most insightful comments is from WebSphere transaction architect Ian Robinson:

Does any of this affect WebSphere? Well, nothing has changed in the core Spring framework. Regardless of what the future holds for the SpringSource Application Platform, the core Spring framework project remains complimentary to WebSphere. Like fish and chips.

Ian is exactly right. The SpringSource Application Platform is another choice for Spring deployment. Nothing has changed in…