Spring Blog

The motivation behind this blog entry is to provide a simple step-by-step guide for getting started with JPA in a standalone environment with the Spring Framework. While the JPA specification originated as the persistence mechanism for EJB 3.0, it was fortunately recognized that any such mechanism should in fact be able to persist simple POJOs. Therefore, with a handful of JARs in your classpath and a few Spring-configured beans, you can begin experimenting with JPA code within your favorite IDE. I will be using Glassfish JPA - which is the reference implementation and is based upon Oracle's TopLink ORM framework.

After more than two and a half years of development, I am delighted to announce that Acegi Security 1.0.0 is now officially released.

Download | Documentation | Changelog 

In addition to more than 80 improvements and fixes since 1.0.0 RC2, this new release includes several changes to help new users. This entails a significant restructure and expansion of the reference guide (now at more than 90 pages) and a new "bare bones" tutorial sample application.

Furthermore, many of the frequently-identified problems experienced by new users have been addressed, such as:

I just got finished with my Spring 2.0: New and Noteworthy talk at Atlanta DevCon 2006. Let me be the first to say that the conference was great. The site and organizers were all top notch. I’d like to give a special shout-out to Burr Sutter for putting on one heck of a conference. You know that things are going well when the conference center doesn’t have a wireless network but you can get the one from the cafe next door. That’s good karma! The JUG members were all very knowledgeable (even the ones that didn’t know about Spring) and asked great questions. I fielded questions about EJB 3, JPA, ESB, Spring learning curves, Java 5, and Spring Web Flow; every one a great question.

Dear Spring community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring 1.2.8 has been released. Download | Docs | Changelog

This is a maintenance release, fixing a number of issues found in previous 1.2.x releases. Most of these fixes have been backported from 2.0 M4, so have already been available there. Please see the changelog for details.

Juergen
—–
Juergen Hoeller
Lead, Spring Framework Development
Chief Architect, Interface21
http://www.springframework.org
http://www.interface21.com

Dear Spring Community,

We are very pleased to announce that Spring Web Flow (SWF) 1.0 RC1 (Release Candidate 1) has been released.  Download it.

After over a year of hard development work, 29,000 downloads, 3,700 posts by 500 forum users, one book, and numerous community-driven articles, this release delivers the first 1.0 release candidate of Spring Web Flow.  Considered fit for production use, this release solidifies the 1.0 API which will remain backward compatible throughout the entire 1.x series.

In a project that I used to work on we had a system that would receive messages from a device and make decisions on whether that information would be passed to the user. There were multiple decision levels and one of the problems we always found ourselves asking was if a message was being lost on it’s way through the system.

Before we moved to Spring, it was nearly impossible to tell the answer to that question. Attempts were made to use logging, but the sheer volume of messages that decisions were made on made it tedious at best. Other attempts were made using debuggers but a combination of the volume and the timing changes led to only intermittent success.

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring IDE 1.3 has been released.

This release of Spring IDE provides some new features
and a bunch of bugfixes. For a complete list visit http://springide.org/project/milestone/Release%201.3

Changes:

• Now Eclipse 3.1 and Web Tools are required!!!
  
  


• Updated to Spring 1.2.7


• Updated version of BeansXmlEditor
  


• Support for searching the BeansCoreModel
  


• Open Spring Bean dialog (similar to JDT’s "Open Type" dialog)


• Wizard for creating a new SpringProject
  


• BeansView can be linked to BeansXmlEditor
  


• Now any filename extensions for BeansConfig files are supported
  

Dear Spring community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring 2.0 M4 has been released.  Download | Docs | Changelog

Spring 2.0 M4 is the fourth milestone of the next generation of Spring.

The new and noteworthy include:

• updated JPA support
• named parameter support for JDBC acces
• refined XML schema namespaces
• auto-proxying for FactoryBean-created objects
• and many other refinements noted in the changelog.

This release also contains numerous fixes for issues discovered since M3.  Users of previous milestones are encouraged to update.  See the changelog for details on all M4 changes.

With this release we are approaching a feature freeze for the 2.0 production target, with only a few further features and refinements planned for inclusion in 2.0. The next release will be Spring 2.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1), scheduled for May.

We will also release a 1.2.8 maintenance release within a few days, backporting all applicable fixes from 2.0 M4. (This is already available from mbranch-1-2 in CVS, awaiting final tests.)

Enjoy and keep the feedback rolling in,

Juergen
—–
Juergen Hoeller
Lead, Spring Framework Development
Chief Architect, Interface21
http://www.springframework.org
http://www.interface21.com

Recently I was working on a project that had a Swing client communicating via RMI to a service layer. The service layer was marked with transactions and everything seemed to work fine. However everytime we’d get an exception at the Hibernate DAO layer, Spring would turn the exception into a runtime exception and it would get propagated all the way up the stack and across the RMI connection as a RemoteException. Whenever the exception was deserialized there would be an exception on the client (separate from the RemoteException.The decision was taken to simply introduce an aspect. Any exception that subclassed ServiceAccessException would be let through to the client while anything else would be converted to a FilteredServiceAccessException (a subclass of ServiceAccessException) and then be thrown. This led to some loss in content, so we made sure to log the original exception on the server where it could be useful and let the client show a generic dialog so the user knew generally what had happened.

With the release of Spring 1.1 the Spring community was given it’s first taste of JMS support. This support included exception translation, message conversion, and a template class much like JdbcTemplate. This support also took care of domain unification between the JMS 1.0.2 and 1.1 specs. The centerpieces of this support are the JmsTemplate class and it’s JMS 1.0.2 counterpart JmsTemplate102.

This support was a great improvement over using the raw JMS APIs to do enterprise messaging. However it did have a shortcoming; the JmsTemplate only supported synchronous reception of messages using the JmsTemplate.receive() methods. This behavior worked well for many people but the vast majority of users of ended up rolling their own implementations of an asynchronous consumer. In short, they wanted what EJB 2 called Message Driven Beans.