In the run up to The Spring Experience I've been busy but I've noticed that Rod's been really active on the blogging front. So in some spare time in airports and on planes today, I've decided to do a little blogging.

One of the biggest balancing acts that we in the Spring community have is to make sure that we stay backwards compatible while still innovating. Part of that innovation is taking advantage of new features and constructs in later versions of Java such as Java 5. Since the 1.2.x branch, we've seen some of this with things like the @Transactional annotation and our JMX auto-detection based on the @ManagedResource annotation. In the end these are great features and have greatly simplified development (at least mine anyway), but they really amount to moving metadata into the code. What we hadn't seen was…

Thanks to our philosophy of pluggability and a lot of hard work in the implementation, the Spring IoC container (like most of the rest of Spring) is extremely flexible.

One point that is often missed is that Spring configuration need not be in XML, although the XML format is by far the most commonly used. Spring has its own internal metadata format in the form of the BeanDefinition interface and subinterfaces. The BeanFactory and ApplicationContext implementations that represent IoC container instances are powered by this Java metadata, and are quite separate from metadata parsing, which is…

If you've followed October's Spring 2.0 release, you will know that one of the big new features was XML extension name spaces: the ability to define new XML elements and attributes that generate Spring metadata, and can be used alongside regular bean definitions. This provides a valuable new extension point and makes Spring configuration both more simpler to use for many repeated tasks and more powerful.

However, there is also a sweet little piece of syntax sugar that you may not have noticed--probably because no one in the Spring team has gotten around to telling you... Having promised myself…

I am regularly asked about the origin of the name “Spring.”

The name goes back to late 2002. In November 2002, I published Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development. The book was accompanied by 30,000 lines of framework code, which had accounted for a good deal of the year full-time I put into writing the book. (Writing a 750 page book is enough work on its own; writing a substantial framework to go along with it is sheer masochism. It was hard.) Many of the fundamental concepts of the Spring Framework were there: an already capable IoC container, with BeanFactory and ApplicationContext…

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…

I was in San Francisco for Oracle World. I even spoke briefly in Thomas Kurian's keynote on Java middleware. But Neelan and I had to leave on Tuesday and missed the Big Deal: Larry Ellison announcing that Oracle are offering support for Linux.

This is an interesting event from the perspective of the open source business. What are the wider implications?

Oracle are offering support for an open source product that they did not create and don't control.

This is possible for a number of reasons:

• Linux is not a product. It is a class of technology, and companies or organizations assemble, document, distribute and support products.
• Linux support is already commoditized to some extent. Red Hat is only one of several distributors offering support.
• The leadership of Linux is diffused. Linus Torvalds does not work for a big distributor; Red Hat does more than most but no single company provides clear leadership.
• The leadership of Linux matters less than you think. Linux is not primarily an engine of innovation, but an engine of commodization.

However, it's interesting to think about what the limits are for companies such as Oracle in providing…

Rod and I are here in San Francisco at Oracle OpenWorld 2006. This is indeed a scene. I can't decide if "hubris" or "impressive" is the right way to describe it but the numbers don't lie. They are expecting 45000 people for the conference and the City of San Francisco thinks the show will generate $50-60M in money for the city. Apparently, no Oracle employee is allowed to stay in a hotel north of the airport. One of the more shocking things was that the city blocked off a chunk of Howard St. in front of Moscone for the conference.

In this morning's Oracle Develop keynote given by Thomas Kurian, Senior Vice President at Oracle, Spring was front and center. Thomas had Rod get on stage during the keynote and describe what Spring is and what's new with Spring 2.0. Rod also talked about the collaboration…

Spring 2.0 went final on Tuesday! This is the product of 9 months of hard work from the Spring team, and huge amounts of user feedback (thanks!) and it's a big step forward.

I promise my next blog will be about something other than download numbers. I've been playing around with some interesting approaches to testing pointcuts in @AspectJ annotations, so I'm hoping next time to post some interesting code.

But we just noticed some pretty amazing figures from SourceForge, so I can't resist posting about them. There were over 10,000 downloads of Spring 2.0 in the first 24 hours! Interest in Spring 2.0 has been building for months--with some users already in production with a release candidate, including a prominent media site in Europe--and I think Keith's brilliant launch page…

One last Spring 2.0 announcement on a day full of them. The Maven POMs for Spring 2.0 are up in Spring's private repository. If you want to point to it directly check https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/springframework/repos/repo/. If you want to wait, they should be replicated into the Ibiblio Maven repository over the next couple of days.

For those of you who like to browse around with a bit more metadata, the ViewVC interface from SourceForge is a good choice. Remember that you should use the earlier link as a URL for maven, but you can use the later link for browsing.