If you're reading this blog, chances are that you already know Spring is a pretty popular framework. Most J2EE developers who've ever used it simply love it, as illustrated by 12+ books, 1,000,000+ downloads, 14,000+ forum members etc. Still, even I was surprised when my Australian Spring user group announcement a little over a week ago generated this much interest... As of today, we've had over five hundred registrations to attend these three meetings. Indeed, we've needed to move the Sydney meeting to larger premises, with the Brisbane and Melbourne meetings almost booked out. If you're located in Australia and would like to come along, I'd encourage you to register ASAP to avoid disappointment (don't forget to also subscribe to Australasia Spring Interest to hear about future events).

Whilst on the topic of user group meetings, at the last Sydney meeting I presented a session on using Spring 2.0 Namespaces. These are a fantastic new feature in Spring 2.0 that can be used to simplify your existing configuration - or even build your own problem domain-specific configuration schema. If you'd like to know more about this, here are the slides. You might also want to check out blog entries by Ben Hale and Erik Wiersma on the same topic.