The Spring Blog

I am glad to report (along side Adrian) that after 3 milestones and 2 release candidates, Spring Dynamic Modules (formerly known as Spring OSGi) 1.0 has been released.

A lot of features have been improved or added since my previous post (about 1.0 M1); I’ll talk more about them in future entries (there is also the reference documentation that explains the library at length) so I’ll just name a few:

- consistency

We want to provide a powerful, simple and consistent programming model. That’s why Spring Dynamic Modules builds on top of Spring and uses its proven concepts, reliability and ubiquity.

Well, it took a lot longer than we initially anticipated, but I’m really pleased to say that the Spring Dynamic Modules project reached its 1.0 milestone today. When I first posted on this topic back in September of 2006 (“Spring OSGi support gaining momentum”) the initial specification was just an attachment to an issue against the Spring Framework, and connections to the wider OSGi community were only just beginning to be formed.

Fast forward eighteen months, and Spring Dynamic Modules has become a full-fledged project in the Spring portfolio with committers from SpringSource, BEA, and Oracle. Both BEA and Oracle are using Spring Dynamic Modules to build their own OSGi-based products (see for example “WebLogic Event Server - why we used Spring”), and the Spring Dynamic Modules discussion group has almost 1000 members. The OSGi Alliance itself has formed an Enterprise Expert Group, and SpringSource is an active member.

Dear Spring community,

I am pleased to announce that Spring Integration 1.0.0.m1 has been released.
Download| Reference Documentation| JavaDoc

This is the first milestone release of this new addition to the Spring Portfolio. To learn more about the project and what lies ahead, visit the Spring Integration Home. To ask questions, provide feedback, or report issues during this important phase of design and development, please visit the Spring Integration Forum and Issue Tracker.

Mark Fisher
Spring Integration Lead

Job listings are a good indicator of the true adoption of technologies. They indicate whether or not companies are spending money, making it possible to distinguish substance from hype; they indicate the importance for developers of gaining and growing the relevant skills (an important element of technology perpetuation); and they provide a good guide to the safety for companies in adopting a particular technology.

Thus the jobtrends site of Indeed.com, a job listing aggregation site, is an important resource. It allows trends in the number of job requirements to be tracked over time, and makes it convenient to compare technologies.

Spring’s dependency injection (DI) mechanism allows configuring beans defined in application context. What if you want to extend the same idea to non-beans? Spring’s support for domain object DI utilizes AspectJ weaving to extend DI to any object, even if it is created by, say, a web or an ORM framework. This enables creating domain behavior rich objects, since domain objects can now collaborate with the injected objects. In this blog, I discuss the latest improvements in the Spring framework in this area.

Note: This post has been edited to reflect Spring’s move to Pivotal. A more recent blog on Spring Training and Certification is here.

Since I joined SpringSource six months ago as the Director of Training, I have been hearing one consistent request. Based on the growing demand for Spring skills, developers and consultants worldwide are seeking quantifiable ways to demonstrate their Spring expertise. Likewise, the hiring managers behind that demand are asking for a certification program to help identify and hire technologists who have an immediately useful, baseline knowledge of Spring.

Quite a day for news as we complete our first annual Spring eXchange in London. First, the news that Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL, and then the long anticipated acquisition of BEA Systems by Oracle. Before commenting any further, I want to congratulate all of our friends at MySQL, especially Mårten Mickos, and all of our friends at BEA. The trend of consolidation in this industry is increasing.

As an open source company, we are thrilled to see MySQL rewarded for their effort. We have seen how hard Mårten and his colleagues have worked to build their software, community and a strong business, benefiting countless developers in the process. They have been among the pioneers of open source. More importantly, we have appreciated the counsel and advice the MySQL folks have given us as we build our business in northern California and around the world. Their success is well earned and we wish them all the success in the world in their new endeavors.

Last Friday was Tony (C.A.R.) Hoare’s birthday. Who is C. A. R. Hoare? If you’re a programmer, you’re probably familiar with Quicksort–an elegant and surprisingly simple sorting algorithm that is blazingly fast in most cases. If you studied computer science, you’ve almost certainly implemented Quicksort in numerous languages, and will recognize the animation on this page. Hoare invented Quicksort in 1960, and it’s now the most widely used sorting algorithm.

Among other contributions, Hoare also invented the Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) language used to specify the interactions of concurrent processes. A smart guy, who has made a notable contribution to the evolution of computer science.

Spring 2.5.1 is the first bug fix and enhancement release in the Spring 2.5 series. It closes a couple of gaps found in Spring 2.5 final and introduces various new features in the context of Java 6 and Java EE 5 support:

• Java-5-specific Model interface for use with MVC handler methods
• @ModelAttribute’s default attribute names are consistently derived from the declared parameter/return type
• Support for last-modified handling in @RequestMapping handler methods (through the WebRequest interface)
• SpringBeanAutowiringSupport class for self-autowiring classes within a web app (e.g. JAX-WS endpoints)
• EJB3-compliant SpringBeanAutowiringInterceptor for processing Spring’s @Autowired in EJB3 SBs/MDBs
• Remoting support for the HTTP server that is included in Sun’s JDK 1.6 (covering HTTP invoker, Hessian and Burlap)
• "jms:listener-container" tag supports a concurrency range (e.g. "3-5"), for specifying a minimum number of consumers
• Tiles2 support works on JDK 1.4 as well
• Any many further enhancements in the details…

At The Spring Experience, I hosted a session various aspects. One of them was the Hibernate synchronization aspect that I described last week. Another was an aspect capable of capturing first failures and system state, sometimes called First-Failure Data Capture (FFDC). I hosted this session to show off some aspects that are very useful, but that people might not have come across in practice yet. I often hear people asking about aspects other than logging, tracing, transaction management and security. The Hibernate synchronization aspect and the FFDC aspect are nice examples I think.