It has been quite a year for Spring.NET. We have gone through two milestone and two release candidates before the GA release in December. The first chunks of code for the 1.1 release were made way back in late 2004 by Aleks Seovic who started work on the ASP.NET framework. In short, it has been a long time in the making. Being the end of year, a natural time for reflection both past and present, I'd like to say thanks to the other members of the project and the Spring.NET community for all their contributions and support. I'm looking forward to a great 2008!

The feature set of Spring.NET 1.1 is quite broad. An IoC container for Dependency Injection, AOP, ASP.NET framework, declarative transaction management and more. However, the biggest bang for the buck you can get to improve the structure and testability of your code is to add Dependency Injection and AOP into your proverbial developer tool chest. Dependency Injection is the more foundational…

Sometimes important changes sneak up. Such changes aren't driven by marketing campaigns, but by many individual decisions; there's no fanfare; by the time they're observed, they have surprising momentum. I mentioned one such development in my opening keynote at the recent Spring Experience conference: the steady rise of Tomcat.

Recently we've begun running polls on SpringFramework.org, and some of the results are interesting. The question Which application server(s) do you use? produced the following results: BEA WebLogic (various versions) and JBoss AS shared first place among Java EE app…

In my recent post, I had mentioned that the Subversion repository for Spring Integration would be publicly accessible soon, and I'm pleased to provide that link now. You can checkout the project with the following command:

svn co https://anonsvn.springframework.org/svn/spring-integration/base/trunk spring-integration

If the checkout is successful, you should see the following directory structure:

spring-integration/
  +--build-spring-integration/
  +--spring-build/
  +--spring-integration-core/
  +--spring-integration-samples/

I would like to take this opportunity to walk through a couple of…

We are pleased to announce that the Spring .NET 1.1 final release is now available

Download | Support | Documentation | Changelog

 Feature Summary

•  Inversion of Control Container
• Aspect-Oriented Programming Framework
• Aspect Library
• ASP.NET Framework
• ASP.NET AJAX Integration
• ADO.NET Framework
• Declarative Transaction Management
• Declarative Middleware Services
• NHibernate Integration
• NUnit Integration Testing

This release has been a long time in the making and the team would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who has contributed to the project.

Happy Holidays and enjoy!

Dear Spring Community,

we are pleased to announce that Spring IDE 2.0.2 has been released today. 2.0.2 is basically a bug fix and enhancement release, but finally adds tooling support for missing Spring 2.5 features like <context:* /> and <jms:* /> namespaces and the component scan facility.

Download | Documentation | Changelog

The release is available from our release update site. Spring IDE 2.0.2 is compatible with current milestone builds of upcoming Eclipse 3.4 (aka Eclipse Ganymede).

Yesterday morning I presented a 2-part session at The Spring Experience entitled "Enterprise Integration Patterns with Spring". The first presentation included an overview of core Spring support for enterprise integration - including JMS, remoting, JMX, scheduling, and email. That presentation also included a high-level discussion of several of the Enterprise Integration Patterns introduced in the book of the same name by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf. In the second presentation, I officially unveiled "Spring Integration" - a new addition to the Spring portfolio. Spring Integration builds upon…

Dear Spring community,
I'm pleased to announce that Spring Web Services 1.5.0 M1 has been released.

Download | Reference documentation | API documentation

This milestone release introduces:

• JMS transport support, for both client- and server-side
• Email transport support, also for both client and server
• Two new Spring namespaces, which drastically decrease the amount of XML to configure marshallers and typical Spring-WS constructs
• SOAP 1.2 Compatible WSDL descriptor generation
• Spring-WS jars are now OSGi bundles

Additionally, there are other minor improvements and bug fixes.

Spring-WS 1.5.0 M1 is the first milestone in the 1.5 series, which - in addition to the aforementioned features - will include support for WS-Addressing, WS-Security for the client-side and Java 1.4, @Endpoint component scanning, and more.

For more information, see Spring Web Services.

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring LDAP version 1.2.1 has been released. This is an update release that adds a new pooling library and fixes a few problems that were in 1.2. Download | ChangeLog

A summary of the more important changes:

• Added pooling library which features flexible connection validation and better configuration than the built-in pooling. Many thanks to Eric Dalquist for this contribution. (LDAP-85)
• Fixed a problem in AbstractContextSource which led to an unnecessary reference to the LDAP Booster Pack (ldapbp). (LDAP-88, LDAP-89)
• Fixed bug in SimpleLdapTemplate where the wrong target method was being called. (LDAP-93)
• Made createContext in AbstractContextSource protected rather than package private. (LDAP-94)

About Spring LDAP
Spring LDAP is a Java library for simplifying LDAP operations, based on the pattern of Spring's JdbcTemplate. The framework relieves the user of the burden of looking up and closing contexts, looping through results, encoding/decoding values and filters, and more.

The LdapTemplate class encapsulates all the plumbing work involved in traditional LDAP programming, such as creating a DirContext, looping through NamingEnumerations, handling Exceptions and cleaning up resources. This leaves the programmer to handle the important stuff - where to find data (DNs and Filters) and what do do with it (map to and from domain objects, bind, modify, unbind, etc.), in the same way that JdbcTemplate relieves the programmer of all but the actual SQL and how the data maps to the domain model.

In addition to this, Spring LDAP provides transaction support, a pooling library, exception translation from NamingExceptions to a mirrored unchecked NamingException hierarchy, as well as several utilities for working with filters, LDAP paths and Attributes.

Spring-LDAP requires J2SE 1.4. J2SE 1.4 is required for building. J2EE 1.4 (Servlet 2.3, JSP 1.2) is required for running the example.

Where to start
Download the distribution from the link above. The distribution contains extensive JavaDoc documentation as well as full reference documentation and a sample application illustrating different ways to use Spring LDAP.

Home
The permanent home of Spring LDAP is at http://www.springframework.org/ldap.

History
Spring LDAP is based on the SourceForge LdapTemplate project. Users of LdapTemplate are advised to switch to Spring LDAP.

Mattias Arthursson & Ulrik Sandberg
Spring LDAP Project Team

I was cruising the blogosphere today and encountered one of the shortest blogs I've ever read. To quote nearly the entire entry, "Every time you use Acegi, a fairy dies. The sad thing is there really isn't anything better around...".

Between our community forums, developer lists, JIRA, user conference BOFs, training, support, consulting and team blog, we receive a great deal of community feedback. There is little doubt that many people have sought improvements to the Spring Security (formerly Acegi) configuration format, and we've invested a lot of time in making that possible.

As I'll be presenting at next week's Spring Experience conference, Spring Security 2.0.0 M1 features tremendously simplified configuration. You will now be able to add Spring Security to your…