Spring 2.0 Highlights

Rod starts the presentation with saying that the final 2.0 release will probably be scheduled at the 5'th of July this year. This is good because enable a lot of projects, during the summer to conclude the upgrade to Spring 2.0. A lot of development environments enforces summer freeze periods which makes the summer an attractive period for experimenting with such things. Currently I am busy with getting thins production ready for a big client so I will have to do this on my spare time when I am not hanging out with the guys at PhatMC.com

There are a lot of nice new features that are of particular interest to me as we are using spring at the project I am currently working on. Especially the support for Asynch Messaging without MDBS's with is really good. By trying to replace the message activation infrastructure we are currently using by POJO based messaging we will probably be able to

1. simplify packaging and deployment, no longer any need to package EJB's (we only use MDBS)
2. Move some of the testing in from the container based integration environments into the continues testing environment and JUnit tests

Also simplified configuration, and XML-schema support will probably enable us to reduce the amount of spring config we are using. The support for dynamic languages will probably also enable us to experiment with new ways of handling spring configuration and the proliferation of configuration files. And yeah, its fully backwards compatible.

One of the reasons why Spring 2.0 has been delayed has been the support for JPA, which seems to gain momentum and supported by Toplink, Hibernate and Kodo.