Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the third milestone release of the Spring Mobile project is now available!

Spring Mobile provides extensions to Spring MVC that aid in the development of cross-platform mobile web applications. The 1.0.0.M3 release ships a general facility for user site preference management that can be used independently or in conjunction with the mobile site switcher. See the changelog and reference manual for all the info.

Download the release distribution or pull the artifacts from Maven using the following:

    <repository>
        <id>org.springframework.maven.milestone</id>
        <name>Spring Maven Milestone Repository</name>
        <url>http://maven.springframework.org/milestone</url>
    </repository>
&lt;dependency&gt;
    &lt;groupId&gt;org.springframework.mobile&lt;/groupId&gt;
    &lt;artifactId&gt;spring-mobile-device&lt;/artifactId&gt;
    &lt;version&gt;1.0.0.M3&lt;/version&gt;
&lt;/dependency&gt;

Get sample apps over at github.com/SpringSource/spring-mobile-samples | git clone git://github.com/SpringSource/spring-mobile-samples.git

This release marks our third iteration with early adopters in the community using Spring Mobile in their own applications. If you are building a mobile web app, we encourage you try out 1.0.0.M3 and collaborate with us on the next iteration of the project.

In the last year, new Spring projects have launched in a number of areas, including social, mobile, data, and integration. I've been doing this for nearly 7 years, and honestly it has never been as exciting for me as it is today. I feel this way because our community understands the importance of raising the bar by building on the foundations you've laid before. That's why we're able to move so quickly, and that's a testament to the quality of the core development team led by Juergen Hoeller.

One thing I'm very excited about is the increasing number of community contributions we're seeing. These have traditionally come in as patches via JIRA, but modern social coding platforms such as Github and Gitorious have opened new opportunities. In this blog entry, I'd like to present a new contribution…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the second milestone release of the Spring Mobile project is now available!

Spring Mobile provides extensions to Spring MVC that aid in the development of cross-platform mobile web applications. The defining feature of the 1.0.0.M2 release is a "site switcher" that switches mobile users to your mobile site unless they have indicated a preference for your normal site. This is useful in applications that aim to provide a separate site for mobile users.

For more details on the site switching algorithm, see the Change Log.

To see the site-switcher in action, check out the lite-showcase sample application and watch its supporting screencast:

This milestone is the second in an exciting road ahead. We invite you to get involved in Spring Mobile development and look forward to your feedback!

* The Spring Mobile 1.0.0.M2 screencast contains free music by the band The Smashing Pumpkins. The screencast is not affiliated with or endorsed by The Smashing Pumpkins.

At SpringOne2gx we announced exciting new initiatives in the areas of social media and mobile application development. A few weeks ago, Craig Walls released Spring Social. Today, Roy Clarkson released Spring Mobile and Spring Android. In this post, I'd like to highlight these projects and share how Spring aims to simplify mobile application development.

Choices in Mobile Application Development

If you attended SpringOne2gx this year, you've seen Greenhouse, an app we built for our community that also serves as a reference and driver for Spring technology. Craig showed you some of the social elements of Greenhouse, such as the ability to connect your account with Twitter and Facebook. There are also a number of mobile elements. Specifically, Greenhouse doubles as a mobile web app, and sports native Greenhouse for iPhone…

Since the big Spring 3 release last year, I've been working on a number of application development projects and extracting "showcases" of various framework features. These "showcases" are not reference applications or tutorials, they're more like acceptance tests for specific framework capabilities. After seeing a showcase, you should have a good idea of what the technology can do.

The first showcase I've put together is for Spring MVC 3, our web framework. It includes a sample project, along with a supporting slide presentation and screencast. After digging in, you should have a good…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring Web Flow 2.0.9 is now available. Download | Reference Documentation | Change Log

This release includes a number of minor bug fixes, as well as an update to the version of Dojo that addresses a Dojo security vulnerability.

In addition to 2.0.x maintenance, the Web Flow project team is currently working on a 2.1 release that provides a current generation version of Web Flow that builds on Spring 3. At the same time, work is continuing towards the first 3.0 milestone for the next generation Web Flow. Watch for future announcements…

In my last entry, I walked you through several enhancements in Spring 3 for web application development. A number of you expressed interest in a follow-up entry focused on Ajax remoting. Spring 3 provides a lot in this area to take advantage of. Read on, and I'll walk you through it.

Spring and Ajax Overview

For the purposes of this article, when I say Ajax, I'm talking about the web browser's ability to communicate with a web server asynchronously using JavaScript. On the server-side, Spring provides the programming model for defining web services, including services consumed by JavaScript clients. On the client-side, nobody rolls their own Ajax framework these days, either. Most use an established JavaScript framework such as jQuery or Dojo…

As Juergen and Arjen have mentioned, Java developers everywhere have a smooth upgrade with Spring 3.0. Now that Spring 3 is out, I'd like to take you through some of the new MVC features you may not know about. I hope you find these features useful and can start putting them to work in your web applications immediately.

This is also the start of a series on "Spring 3 Simplifications", so expect more posts like these in the coming days and weeks.

Configuration Simplification

Spring 3 introduces a mvc namespace that greatly simplifies Spring MVC setup. Along with other enhancements, it has never been easier to get Spring web applications up and running. This can be illustrated by the mvc-basic…

A recent commentor here ragged, "It's only half of the world that's using Maven", when pointing out it is not obvious how to obtain Spring 3 artifacts with Maven. In this entry, I'll show you how to do this and what the options are. This information will also be integrated into the reference documentation of the upcoming Spring 3 final release.

Maven Repositories where Spring Artifacts are Published

In general, Spring publishes its artifacts to two different places:

1. Maven Central, which is the default repository Maven queries, and does not require any special configuration to use
2. The Enterprise Bundle Repository (EBR), which is run by SpringSource and also hosts all the libraries that integrate with Spring

So the first thing you need to decide when obtaining Spring with Maven is which place you'll get it from. In general, if you care about OSGi, use the EBR, since it houses OSGi compatible artifacts for all of Spring's dependencies, such as Hibernate and Freemarker. If OSGi does not matter to you, either place works, though there are some pros and cons between them. In general, pick one place or the other for your project; do not mix them. This is particularly important since EBR artifacts use a different naming convention than Maven Central…

The Spring 3 final release is right around the corner, and it's going to be a great release. In this blog entry, I will take you through some of Spring 3's type conversion and validation enhancements. Whether you are developing a traditional web application, a desktop application, or a "next-generation" RIA, data binding, type conversion, and validation are important areas. As you'll see in this entry, Spring 3 gives you a significant upgrade in each of these areas while preserving backwards compatibility with previous releases.

New System Goals

Before I get into features, I'd first like to highlight the…