A couple of months ago, in the days before I had a blog, there was a discussion by Cedric and Bob about "Getter Injection."

The basic concept is that the IoC container can override abstract or concrete methods on managed objects on deployment. The container is injecting a method, such as a getter method, rather than a reference or primitive as in Setter Injection. As it happened, I was already working on a container method override mechanism for Spring 1.1, which has since been released in Spring 1.1 RC1. It's an interesting concept, and definitely part of a complete IoC container. However, I…

The Spring team are happy to announce the first release candidate of Spring 1.1.

New features and enhancements in Spring 1.1 RC1 include:

• IoC container supports Method Injection: the overriding of concrete or abstract methods, typically to look up a dependency managed by the container. This means even less need to implement Spring-specific interfaces such as BeanFactoryAware.
• The IoC container can now obtain objects from static factory methods as well as constructors. This enhancement allows excellent AspectJ integration: it is now possible to configure AspectJ aspects using Spring Dependency Injection, like any object. We plan to provide examples of AspectJ integration before 1.1 final.
• Support for sending and receiving JMS messages
• Support for Apache OJB as an ORM alternative, within Spring's consistent data access abstraction
• Significantly improved JDO support
• Greater flexibility in translating SQLExceptions, and other JDBC enhancements
• Support for nested transactions and savepoints when working with JDBC. Declarative transaction management can support nested transactions.
• AOP proxies are now serializable if all Advisors and target are serializable
• Improved Velocity and FreeMarker support
• Reworked parent/child bean definition concept: a child can now override any inherited settings. This can be used to simplify configuration.

Spring 1.1 final is scheduled for release in mid August, and will be 100% backward compatible with Spring 1.0.2. As Spring aims to minimize dependency of application code on the framework, and because changes are backward compatible, we do not expect that existing applications will require any code changes to migrate to Spring 1.1.

The main focus between now and the 1.1 final release will be on documentation and examples.

See the changelog for details.

The release can be downloaded here

We are pleased to announce the release of Spring Framework 1.0.2.

This release introduces a variety of enhancements throughout the framework, plus some minor bugs fixes.

Among the enhancements in this release are:

• New "mock" source tree and "spring-mock" jar file, containing JNDI and Servlet API mocks for usage in applications 
  
• CachedIntrospectionResults flushes the JavaBeans Introspector cache for proper garbage collection on shutdown
• Added ObjectFactory interface and ObjectFactoryCreatingFactoryBean, for non-intrusive creation of prototype beans
• AbstractXmlApplicationContext uses PathMatchingResourcePatternResolver for Ant-style config location patterns
• Added support for "xxx*" field…

We are pleased to announce the release of Spring Framework 1.0.1.

This is a bugfix and minor enhancement release;

the most important fixes and new features are:

• added Struts ActionSupport and DispatchActionSupport base classes, for easy access to a Spring context
• added Struts ContextLoaderPlugIn and DelegatingActionProxy, superseding Don Brown's Spring Struts Plugin
• reworked ComponentControllerSupport class for Tiles to be compatible with both Struts 1.1 and Struts 1.2
• fixed Hibernate/JTA synchronization cleanup in case of Hibernate flushing failure on commit
• added support for transaction-scoped Hibernate Sessions with plain JTA or EJB CMT, without JtaTransactionManager
• fixed…

We are pleased to announce that Spring Framework 1.0 final has just been released.

1. SCOPE

Spring 1.0 is a complete Java/J2EE application framework, covering the following functionality:

• the most sophisticated lightweight container available today, with various flavors of setter and constructor injection
• AOP interception framework based on the AOP Alliance interfaces, integrated with the core container
• JNDI support classes, allowing for easy wiring of Spring-managed beans with JNDI-located objects
• application context concept, providing resource loading and message access abstractions
• …

We are pleased to announce that Spring Framework 1.0 Release Candidate 2 has just been released. RC2 covers all features targeted for 1.0 final, which should be released soon.

Changes since Release Candidate 1 include:

• scheduling support via Quartz and Timer
• support for the SqlMapClient API of iBATIS SQL Maps 2
• JdbcTemplate convenience methods, taking prepared statement arguments as Object array
• support for custom RMI socket factories and additional RMI invocation parameters
• PreferencesPlaceholderConfigurer, resolving placeholders via J2SE 1.4 Preferences
• optional "type" attribute for "constructor-arg" tag in XML bean definitions
• revised BeanFactoryLocator implementations
• simplified AOP Advisor interface hierarchy
• revised DataFieldMaxValueIncrementer implementation hierarchy
• extended mapping configuration options in LocalSessionFactoryBean
• metadata support uses latest Commons Attributes snapshot
• VelocityView supports Velocity Tools 1.1

A full list of changes is included in the the changelog.

The release can be downloaded here

On a side note: after the 1.0 release, we will be focussing on new features, some of which can be found in our JIRA. Please have a look, but note that list is still subject to change. [2004-03-01]