Yesterday there were a few posts related to the forthcoming Beginning Spring 2 book, and I wanted to point those out here.

First, since this book will be of interest to those new to Spring - or even those who are simply curious at this point, we decided that it would be a good idea to include some discussion of common misconceptions about Spring. These have been posted here:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2006/08/ten_common_misconceptions_abou.html
and on the Apress blog: http://ablog.apress.com/?p=1221.

Second, Interface21's Steven Devijver, the book's tireless lead author, has posted a great overview:
http://blog.interface21.com/main/2006/08/03/finishing-beginning-spring-2-from-novice-to-professional/.

The book, Beginning Spring 2: from Novice to Professional, will be in stores this October. While it aims to provide a gentle introduction appropriate for new Spring users, it will also be very useful for "filling in the gaps" even if you have been using the Spring Framework for a while. In other words, the book covers a lot of ground: the Spring container, AOP, data acess, MVC, and more. The coverage includes many new Spring 2.0 features - most notably an entire chapter exploring Spring's new and improved approach to AOP such as the XSD-based AOP namespace, integration with the AspectJ pointcut expression language, and @AspectJ integration! (Don't worry Spring 2 is backwards compatible - and the migration path is easy too). Throughout, the book provides a pragmatic balance of theory and examples. Those examples are backed by an interesting sample application (not overly simplistic). I personally was delighted when Steven asked me to contribute some exercises - yet another of his great ideas for providing an excellent resource to beginners. The first set of exercises walk through several techniques of dependency injection from basic wiring to the use of FactoryBeans and externalizing properties files. The second set of exercises are focused on AOP - including the new namespace and the @AspectJ style.

We are looking forward to an active companion site after the book's release, and of course you can continue to find many great discussions and examples of Spring 2.0 features here at the Interface21 team blog.

Over the last month Jay Zimmerman and I have been working hard planning The Spring Experience 2006 (TSE). Creating a first-class technical conference is no easy task--it takes hour upon hours to arrive at the perfect mix of speakers and content.

I am proud to say we are now ready to roll with an unprecedented event. Check it out:

There are a lot of reasons to love working at Interface21, but by far the best has to be working with the leaders of the industry. For example, one of Spring 2.0's major focus points has been on improving AOP support. We've added a new configuration namespace, the AspectJ pointcut language and support for @AspectJ aspects. But this leaves a big question; what is the preferred way of writing Aspects in Spring 2.0? Since I'm an I21 employee, I have the luck of getting the answer straight from the horse's mouth.

I posited the question to Adrian Colyer, the Chief Scientist at Interface21 and…

To celebrate the launch of the new i21 team blog I take this opportunity to introduce a new Spring book that's coming up shortly. It's titled "Beginning Spring 2: from Novice to Professional" and is published by Apress. I've co-authored this book with Mark Fisher (i21), Bram Smeets (of DWR fame) and Seth Ladd (of "Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow" fame). Rob Harrop is the technical reviewer.

The book is targeted - as you might have guessed - to beginning users of the Spring Framework. Now the funny thing about Spring is that you're always a beginner in some areas. The framework offers so much…

Spring 2.0 is coming and I for one am excited. I can still remember the first time that I heard about all of the new features that would be in the release at last year's The Spring Experience. The asynchronous JMS message reception and the AOP integration with AspectJ excited me the most (a bit of drooling involved actually), but even then there were many other improvements and the list has only grown since.

Alas, I know that most of you aren't middle-tier nerds like me, so what are you excited about? The new XML dialects and XSD support? The improved JSP taglib? How about that <tx:annotation-driven />? Maybe you love that Groovy…

As Interface21 grows as a global company one thing has become more and more clear to me everyday:

we really have some damn talented, highly motivated leaders who have a lot to say on both business and technology.

Here you will gain insight into what's going on at i21, from what we're working on, to what problems we're solving, to where we're going, to what we've learned along the way. You'll see a lot of diversity, as our company is doing a lot of things, from leading the development of the Spring Framework and the Spring family of products to expanding operations in five major international markets.

This entire blog is subscribable via RSS. In addition, you can follow your favorites by subscribing to…

The motivation behind this blog entry is to provide a simple step-by-step guide for getting started with JPA in a standalone environment with the Spring Framework. While the JPA specification originated as the persistence mechanism for EJB 3.0, it was fortunately recognized that any such mechanism should in fact be able to persist simple POJOs. Therefore, with a handful of JARs in your classpath and a few Spring-configured beans, you can begin experimenting with JPA code within your favorite IDE. I will be using Glassfish JPA - which is the reference implementation and is based upon Oracle's…

I just got finished with my Spring 2.0: New and Noteworthy talk at Atlanta DevCon 2006. Let me be the first to say that the conference was great. The site and organizers were all top notch. I'd like to give a special shout-out to Burr Sutter for putting on one heck of a conference. You know that things are going well when the conference center doesn't have a wireless network but you can get the one from the cafe next door. That's good karma! The JUG members were all very knowledgeable (even the ones that didn't know about Spring) and asked great questions. I fielded questions about EJB…