The Spring Blog

The production of nonsense on open source is a highly competitive field. However, I’ve just come across something that raises (lowers?) the bar: a post by an OpenLogic blogger entitled What’s your time worth?

It’s not a long piece, which is handy, as it makes it easier to deconstruct paragraph by paragraph. I’m focusing on enterprise Java, about which I can speak from experience.

The blogger gets to the point right away with a concise statement of why she doesn’t understand open source in the enterprise:

Last month I gave a Core Spring training in Turkey. At the end of the course I discussed the architecture for an application that some of the participants were going to build after completing the course. This application would consist of an ear file with several war files inside, and the question came up if it was possible to define a single ApplicationContext that could be used as a shared parent to the WebApplicationContexts of all war files. This context would hold bean definitions for services, DAOs and other beans that were not specific to a single web module.

I was working on Spring 2.1 stuff this week with Joris. We were preparing a sample using all three ways of doing dependency injection. The sample does not only highlight dependency injection, but also features a back-end based on Hibernate.

Several features in Spring 2.1 require the ASM byte code manipulation framework. Hibernate also uses ASM, through CGLIB. There is a binary incompatibility between ASM 1.5.3 and 2.2.3. The former is used by Hibernate, the latter is used by Spring in various scenarios; specifically in some of the AOP functionality and the new @Autowired features.

Doing it again
It’s already over 2 years since the idea to launch a European conference dedicated to the ever-growing Spring community was first discussed. After having announced the first (2006) edition of SpringOne at JavaPolis 2005, over 400 people signed up for the conference – over 20% more than we anticipated. SpringOne 2006 was a great success.

Due to the piles of positive feedback we have received after the 2006 edition, with many attendees reacting very positively to the strong focus on Spring and enterprise Java, we decided about 7 months ago to organize a 2007 edition. The conference takes place on June 20 – 22, in Antwerp, Belgium. These are some of the highlights.

You may have heard the announcement that Interface21, the company behind Spring, recently raised $10m dollars. Given that we've been around for almost 3 years, and have achieved a lot to date, you might wonder why.

Why did we raise money and what are we going to do with it?

Over the last two years, we've built a great team. Juergen Hoeller, Adrian Colyer, Keith Donald, Colin Sampaleanu, Mark Pollack, Ben Alex, Rob Harrop… It's scary to to start typing that list because I know that I can't include all the talented technologists in this company, and I don't want to imply any ordering of merit… This team is amazing.

During a training last week, for the first time, I used the first Release Candidate of Spring Web Services. It’s hardly been two weeks since Arjen release RC1 of his precious, so it was very nice to show some of the attendees this new product.

Right before the web services part we did a little JMX and remoting, showing Spring’s exporter functionality. As you might know, this allows you to export any Spring-managed bean to a remote endpoint or JMX registry, with just a very little amount of declarative configuration:

As most of you already know by now, Spring is not just about XML as lately, a number of ‘official’ extensions to the core offer alternatives way for configuring the container.

Spring Java Configuration 1.0 M2 was among the products released around JavaOne and, while still marked as a milestone, had an important number of updates and bugfixes:

• the root package has changed to org.springframework.config.java
• scoped beans are fully supported
• the bean name generation can be customized
• the distribution contains a 'transformed' sample (petclinic) which uses XML, JavaConfig and Groovy.

With the release of Spring 2.1-m2, some significant changes have been made to the infrastructure of the Spring distribution. Please see the announcement and changelog for the complete list of changes.

Distribution

The distribution has been trimmed from 26 JARs in 2.1-m1 to 17 JARs in 2.1-m2. Take a look at the changelog for the list of files that changed, but from the commit message, here’s what’s new:

• spring-context.jar includes JMX support and core remoting support (no spring-jmx and spring-remoting jars anymore)
• spring-orm.jar combines all ORM support packages (replaces spring-hibernate, spring-ibatis, spring-jdo, spring-jpa, and spring-toplink jars)
• spring-web.jar contains web-related remoting and ORM classes (for proper use in J2EE EAR deployment structures)
• renamed spring-dao.jar to spring-tx.jar, also containing the JCA support now
• renamed spring-support.jar to spring-context-support.jar
• renamed spring-portlet.jar to spring-webmvc-portlet.jar
• module jar files contain module-specific "spring.handlers" and "spring.schemas" files now

Dear Spring Community,

I’m pleased to announce that Spring 2.1 M2 has been released!

This is the second milestone release in the Spring 2.1 series, introducing refinements in the annotation config support as well as support for AspectJ load-time weaving and various further new features.

This release also introduces a revised structure for Spring’s module jars, now prepared for OSGi. Note that Hibernate 2.1 support has been dropped: Spring generally requires Hibernate 3.1 or higher now. 

NOTE: This post has been updated as of May 31, 2007 to reflect the state of the 2.1-M2 official release

Two weeks ago I blogged about the new annotation-driven dependency injection capabilities of Spring 2.1, and I mentioned that I would follow-up with more info "later in the week". It turns out that was a bit optimistic, but the good news is the functionality has evolved quite a bit in the meantime. Therefore, to follow along with the examples here you will need to download the 2.1-M2 official release (or if you are one of the first people to read this updated entry and M2 is not yet available, you should grab at least nightly build #115 which you can download here).