Article: Spring 2.0: What's New and Why it Matters

by Floyd Marinescu on Jan 14, 2007 |

Spring co-founder Rod Johnson provides the definitive article on the motivations behind and uses of the new features in Spring 2.0. This first article covers the Spring core container, XML configuration extensions, AOP enhancements and Java 5-specific features.

Read Spring 2.0 What's New and Why it Matters

What's the big picture in Spring 2.0? Rod provides a high level, after which zooming in on how to actually get started with each:

Configuration extensions: In Spring 2.0, Spring supports extensible XML configuration, enabling the development of custom elements that offer a new level of abstraction for generating Spring bean definitions. The XML extension mechanism also allows the provision of new tags to simplify many common tasks.

Major enhancements in the AOP framework, which make it both more powerful and easier to use.

Enhanced support for Java 5.

The ability for Spring beans to be implemented in dynamic languages, such as Groovy, JRuby and Beanshell, while retaining all the services of the Spring component model, such as Dependency Injection, out of the box declarative services and AOP.

Many new features including a Portlet MVC framework, "message driven POJOs," integration with new APIs including the Java Persistence API (JPA) and an asynchronous task execution framework.

Spring is a featured topic on InfoQ for the next couple of months, you can see all of our in-depth Spring content at http://infoq.com/spring. Rod Johnson is also presenting on Spring 2 at QCon London (March 12-16).

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Acegi by craig schneider Posted

Excellent article, Rod! by David Main Posted

2nd article by Martin Gilday Posted

nicest article but... by Joshua H. Song Posted

Acegi by craig schneider

Many products build on Spring, and their configuration can become simpler using namespaces. A good example is Acegi Security for Spring (to be rebranded Spring Security in early 2007)

Where can I find out more information on this? Are the Acegi package names going to change again and will they be included in spring.jar?

Excellent article, Rod! by David Main

I just wanted to say thanks for putting this together, Rod. Besides providing ever more details on the uses and value of Spring, it is well written... which seems to characterize much of the documentation associated with Spring. And that makes Spring all the more accessible.

2nd article by Martin Gilday

A very useful article. Even though we have been using Spring 2 for some time now this highlighted some areas we had missed.
Will the 2nd article also be posted on InfoQ?

nicest article but... by Joshua H. Song

your story about spring 2.0 reminds me of this short story..

A: do you know how to store an elephant in your fridge?
B: i don't know
A: simple. first, open the fridge's door, second, push the elephant into the fridge, third, close the door.
B: WOW.

is spring 2.0 really worthy to be versioned as 2.0?
oohhhh i'm getting fuzzy in this world of two dot o.