Second in a series of posts on "Spring 3 Simplifications" started yesterday by Keith, I'd like to provide a very brief and hands-on introduction to Spring's new @Configuration annotation and related support.

As those that followed the Spring JavaConfig project will know, a @Configuration-annotated class serves much the same role as a Spring XML file. It provides a code-centric way of declaring Spring bean definitions using nothing more than methods and annotations. You might call it Plain Old Configuration* :) This means that for simple situations, no XML will be required!

Let's get started. To demonstrate @Configuration functionality, I've created a very simple project in the new spring-samples SVN repository. You may want to sync up and…

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…

Hot on the heels of Spring 3.0 and Spring DM 1.2.1, I'm delighted to announce that dm Server 2.0 RC1 is now available. RC1 is feature complete and, barring any major problems being found, will be the final 2.0 release early in the new year. So, please download the RC and give us your feedback: it's your last chance to shape the 2.0 release!

If you're interested in what's changed since M6, please take a look at the release notes.

Thank you for all of the feedback that we've had during the development of 2.0. Please keep it coming as we move towards the final release.

Feature overview

There's a lot of great…

After a long ride, it is my pleasure to announce that Spring 3.0 GA (.RELEASE) is finally available (download page)! All of SpringSource is celebrating - join the party :-)

For some very recent news, Spring 3.0 GA is compatible with Java EE 6 final in terms of runtime environments now (e.g. on GlassFish v3 as released last week) and supports JPA 2.0 final already (e.g. using EclipseLink 2.0). We also support the newly introduced @ManagedBean (JSR-250 v1.1) annotation for component scanning now, which nicely complements our @Inject (JSR-330) support for annotation-driven dependency injection.

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Steve Jin, the creator of The Virtual Infrastructure Java API or vSphere API, recently contributed the work he had done for the VMworld 2009 keynote sessions to the CloudTools repository.  CloudTools is the open source project that provides the core infrastructure provisioning and application deployment functionalities to Cloud Foundry.  Steve's code not only demonstrates how a Java application can be deployed through the Cloud Foundry user-interface to a vSphere infrastructure, it also shows how easily one can add an adaptor to CloudTools to enable Java application deployments to different…

This article deals with the choices that Spring makes and the options that developers have for logging in applications built with Spring. This is timed to coincide with the imminent release of Spring 3.0 not because we have changed anything much (although we are being more careful with dependency metadata now), but so that you can make an informed decision about how to implement and configure logging in your application. First we look briefly at what the mandatory dependencies are in Spring, and then go on to discuss in more detail how to set your application up to use some examples of…

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…

We decided to publish a further Spring 3.0 release candidate before going GA: Get it from the download page, do a round of thorough testing, and let us know how it works for you. Spring 3.0 is now waiting for your integration test feedback and will eventually go GA in mid December.

This release candidate comes with several enhancements: e.g. extended functionality in the new <mvc:*> namespace, and a further revision of startup/shutdown behavior (affecting message listeners and scheduled tasks). Feel free to give those features an early try! We are also keen to learn about upgrade experiences with existing Spring 2.5 applications since we expect many of your applications to selectively adopt 3.0 features... while keeping the majority of the code…

This week the Gemini project proposal was unveiled at Eclipse.org. Gemini is part of the Eclipse RT (runtime) project which is "designed to foster, promote and house runtime efforts in Eclipse, on the basis of the Equinox framework and OSGi" (Eclipse RT mission statement). Gemini itself is an umbrella project bringing together a collection of modules designed for enterprise application development. SpringSource and Oracle are the first two companies providing committers to the project, and several other companies have expressed interest in joining too.

The initial projects being contributed to…