Yesterday we published a final release candidate build of the upcoming SpringSource Tool Suite version 2.0. The RC build is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from the STS product page.

STS 2.0 is equipped with new productivity tools for developing Spring applications, like Quick Fixes, as-you-type validation and correction, project and bean creation wizards as well as a Visual Spring Configuration Editor and more. Stay tuned for more information on these new features.

Additionally STS 2.0 comes with tools for OSGi-based application development that experienced as well as new adopters…

Dear Spring Community,

I'm pleased to announce that the second public development milestone of Spring BlazeDS Integration, the newest of the open source Spring projects, is now available.

Download | Reference Documentation | JavaDocs | Changelog

The main features of note that have been added in this release are integration with Spring Security, and simplified XML-namespace-based configuration.  The namespace support results in significantly simpler Spring configuration files than using the full <bean> syntax, especially when using the new security features.

The community has thus far been providing us with some great feedback, and I encourage anyone interested to get involved by trying out the new functionalityand giving us feedback in the community forum and Jira as we progress towards a full-fledged 1.0.

We are looking forward to releasing RC1 in the very near future with the final major new features being centered around messaging integration, including support for both basic Spring JMS, and for more complex routing scenarios using Spring Integration channels.  

In case you missed it, Christophe Coenraets from Adobe recently provided a great introduction to Spring BlazeDS Integration on Adobe TV.  

Jeremy Grelle
Spring BlazeDS Integration Lead 

I'm very pleased to report here the very recent release of Groovy 1.6, which happened under the SpringSource umbrella, since the acquisition of G2One by SpringSource.

Groovy 1.6 is a very important milestone for the project, bringing tremendous performance improvements making Groovy the fastest dynamic language for the JVM, as well as several new powerful features adding more weapons to your dynamic language arsenal.

In particular, beyond the usual bug fixes and minor enhancements, let me mention the following novelties:

• multiple assignments
• optional return in if/else and try/catch blocks
• AST transformations and all the provided transformation annotations like @Bindable, @Vetoable, @Singleton, @Lazy, @Immutable, @Delegate, @Category, @Mixin and @Newify
• the Grape module and dependency system and its @Grab transformation
• various Swing builder improvements, thanks to the Swing / Griffon team
• as well as several Swing console improvements
• the integration of JMX builder
• JSR-223 scripting engine built-in
• various metaprogramming improvements, like the ExpandoMetaClass Domain-Specific Language, per-instance metaclasses even for POJOs, and runtime mixins
• OSGi readiness with the Groovy JAR being a full-blown OSGi bundle

A very detailed article on InfoQ, entitled "What's new in Groovy 1.6?", delves into all these new features and enhancements, with code samples and explanations.

If you wish to learn more about Groovy, and in particular Groovy 1.6, you should definitely consider attending SpringOne Europe, in April, where sessions on Groovy and Graills…

UPDATE - Feb 21 '12: Spring Framework has moved to GitHub, and for 3.2.x development has moved from Ant to Gradle. Take a look at the building from source section of the README there for (greatly simplified!) instructions.

Introduction

As Juergen announced last week, Spring 3.0 Milestone 2 is now available. In this post, I'll show you in six steps how to download and build the latest Spring 3 sources and get a development environment up and running in Eclipse.

We'll wrap up by discussing the best ways to follow Spring 3 development, how to file bugs and improvement requests, and considerations for…

If you aren't following the SpringSource blog you may have missed it, but last week Juergen Hoeller announced the availability of the second milestone for Spring 3.0. Juergen's blog post covers all of the details about the milestone including the new RestTemplate, early JPA 2.0 support, more Java 5 style API updates and other improvements.

You can always get the latest milestones, release candidates and full releases for Spring from the download center.

Introduction

In this blog post I will show you how to create a loosely coupled and scalable application with Spring Integration and dm Server. The added benefit of using OSGi will allow us to change the behavior of the application at runtime and of course we're going to have some fun with that too. First I will quickly highlight the reasons for designing an application for concurrent use, then I will describe different strategies of integrating OSGi bundles with Messaging. Along the way you will get a glimpse of our tooling and some of the dm Server features. You should be able to do this yourself, if you…

We are pleased to announce that the second Spring 3.0 milestone is finally available (download page). This release comes with a wealth of revisions and new features:

Further Java 5 style API updates: consistent use of generic Collections and Maps, consistent use of generified FactoryBeans, and also consistent resolution of bridge methods in the Spring AOP API. Generified ApplicationListeners automatically receive specific event types only. All callback interfaces such as TransactionCallback and HibernateCallback declare a generic result value now. Overall, the Spring core codebase is now…

Due to the extensive travel schedule of yours truly, we haven't had a meet up since last September. It's been almost half a year, so it's about time for another one.

But, before we move on, I'd like to make point out a new Google Group that we have set up, to keep you posted about this. I received a lot of requests to set up a mailing list over the past few years, so from now on, the main place to keep an eye on, for new Java Meetup dates, is the Java Meetup Google Group. Sign up there to get the dates delivered right to your inbox.

Okay, on to the details for the next meetup:

• When: March 13th 2009
• Where: De Jaren - Nieuwe Doelenstraat, Amsterdam (map, below)
• Time: starting 5.30pm
• What: drinks and chats, about... well, everything

From Central…

My 13 year old son has been programming in Lua, TI Basic and Assembler, ActionScript, JavaScript, and he's into C++/Dark GDK these days. While I've mostly focused on Java for the past few years, I've programmed in a wide range of statically typed and dynamically typed languages.

Since my son is just starting his programming journey, I naturally wondered:

What are the most popular programming languages these days?

I used tiobe.com and langpop.com to answer this question. Both sites provide programming language popularity statistics and rankings, and I was happy to see that Java, C, and C++ rank…