Mark Pollack on Spring.NET 1.2 and Beyond

Posted by Abel Avram on Feb 03, 2009

Sections

Development,

Architecture & Design

Topics

Programming ,

.NET

Tags

Spring ,

Frameworks ,

Spring.NET

InfoQ has interviewed Mark Pollack, founder of Spring.NET, about release 1.2.0, made available late last year, and their plans for the near future. The major new features are: WCF, MSMQ, ActiveMQ, and Quartz.NET integration support. The roadmap contains two bug fixing releases and support for Microsoft’s test framework. Spring.NET 2 will feature ASP.NET MVC support.

The major new features are related to distributed computing, WCF, MSMQ and ActiveMQ:

In this release we support the configuration of WCF services via dependency injection. For MSMQ and ActiveMQ we provide infrastructure classes to simplify the incidental API complexity of these technologies for sending and receiving messages, in particular for creating multithreaded message consumer applications. Another new feature is providing integration classes to help configure Quartz.NET, a very powerful job scheduler.

MSMQ integration was well received by the community, according to Mark, because it relieves the developer from the complexity of writing a multithreaded messaging server. “Spring provides a foundation where you declaratively configure that core infrastructure for a multithreaded MSMQ server, keeping the MSMQ layer very thin, and then delegating message processing to your POCO based application services.”

Spring.NET will continue to follow on Spring’s tracks by incorporating its new features. Nonetheless, “our integration points are around configuration and transaction management, not the core feature set. As such, we are more interested in adding support for developments such as Fluent NHibernate”, said Mark. Also, the Spring.NET team is determined to support .NET specific features not existing in the original Spring framework like LINQ and its associated language features.

Mark commented on the roadmap:

We will have 2 point releases planned for Spring 1.2 focusing on bug fixes but will also add support for integration testing based on Microsoft’s test framework. This provides DI for your test case as well as automatic rollback of transactions after a test method executes.

Spring for .NET 2.0 will introduce a code based approach to configure the Spring container in C#. This is modeled after the approach taken by JavaConfig. Other features are integration with ASP.NET MVC and extend Spring’s declarative transaction management features to work with LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework. We also plan to introduce some project templates to help developers get up and running quickly when creating a new Spring based applications.

1. Back to top

   Spring.NET alternative

   by Vitaliy Fedorchenko

   Actually one more spring-like IoC container (very tiny one and ultra-fast) exists: Winter.NET (it has open-source version); we use it as low-level model processor in our model driven development approach (see also NReco open-source project).
   
   Will Spring.NET also include MDD support in the future?..

   Reply

2. Back to top

   Re: Spring.NET alternative

   by Mark Pollack

   Hi Vitaliy, there are no plans to incorporate any MDD features in Spring.NET.

   Reply

3. Back to top

   tibco EMS support dropped ?

   by gerold kathan

   hej,
   it looks like that the support for tibco EMS messaging has been removed from the version 1.2. There was an implementation for EMS in the previous version. Does anyone know why it is no longer bundled with the release ? any commercial/legal issues ?
   greetz from vienna,
   gerold

   Reply

4. Back to top

   Re: tibco EMS support dropped ?

   by Mark Pollack

   Hi,
   The rational behind that decision was the we would offer the EMS messaging support as part of the purchase of commercial support for Spring.NET. Or in other words, we provide integration with other open source projects within Spring.NET open source but not for commerical products. Would the EMS support still be of interest to you in this arrangement?
   Cheers
   Mark

   Reply

5. Back to top

   Re: tibco EMS support dropped ?

   by gerold kathan

   hej,
   hmmm, tibco itself is already "commercial enough" ;-) i would expect from a framework like spring to provide free support also for commercial "tools" - especially when they have already been supported in a previous version. currently we will stick to the old version.
   => what are the conditions for the mentioned "commercial support" ?
   maybe we can further discuss during qcon next week in london ...
   greetz from vienna,
   gerold

   Reply

6. Back to top

   Re: tibco EMS support dropped ?

   by Mark Pollack

   Hi,
   Yes, getting in touch with the SpringSource folks at QCon would be the best place to have this conversation. I can understand your point of view, it was available in a milestone release (not final) and we changed our policy during the march to 1.2 GA.
   
   Please email me at mark dot pollack at springsource dot com and we can make more detailed arrangements.
   
   Cheers,
   Mark

   Reply

• Older >