Late last year we started talking about the notion of a Spring "release train". The idea behind the release train is that we put out co-ordinated releases of the products in the Spring Portfolio: tested together and working together. You can still pick and choose the pieces you need, but it will be easier to use the various products together when you want to. We're not there yet, but we're on our way.

One of the struggles for us at Interface21 has been that the demand for our support services, training, and consultancy has been so high that we've been working everyone flat out to try and meet it. This has made it hard to get the consistent and predictable product development time we need to pull off something like a release train. That's just one of the many reasons that I'm so excited about the recent announcement of the $10M investment that Benchmark Capital is making in Interface21 (press release). It will enable us to accelerate our product development efforts and bring you more great releases more quickly than we could in the past.

So we're not there yet, but we're on our way. In the meantime, have you noticed just how many Spring Portfolio releases are coming out almost at the same time at the moment ;).

• Spring Batch was announced
• Spring Web Services released 1.0rc1, with 1.0 well on its way
• Spring OSGi put out an m2 release, and we're steaming towards m3
• Acegi just released 1.0.4, and very soon you'll see "Spring Security 2.0.0 m1" as we bring Acegi fully into the Spring Portfolio and integrate it with the namespace support in Spring 2 to simplify configuration
• Spring Java Configuration has released 1.0 m2.
• Spring Web Flow has a 1.0.4 release coming out, as well as 1.1 m1. I won't steal Keith's thunder here but you're going to like it :). Check out the video in his recent blog entry on this site to see some of the great new JSF integration.
• Spring Framework 2.1 m1 was released, featuring improved support for annotation-based configuration (it's an option: use annotations, xml, or any combination that meets your needs. If one thing is clear here it is that different folks all have very different preferences).
• Spring .NET 1.1 m1 is imminent
• Spring IDE 2.0 m4 was released, and 2.0 final is on its way. Thanks to the Spring IDE team for their great work here. I've seen the screenshots of the forthcoming Mylar integration and that's going to rock!
• Spring LDAP 1.2 RC1 was released (this is also a community-led project so Interface21 doesn't take any credit for that, but we're certainly very grateful).

With so much going on, you're sure not to want to miss out on SpringOne this year where you can hear all about these exciting new releases.

Oh, and for those of you who are curious to know, we're currently aiming for a 2.1 final release of the Spring Framework by the end of July....