The first milestone release of Spring 3.1 has just been published [1], and this article kicks off a series of posts where I and other team members will walk through each of the major features. Even in the first milestone there's already a lot to talk about! I've developed a small sample to accompany this post, and you might like to take a moment now to check it out (if not, don't worry; you don't need the code to read along below). Just follow the instructions on the README at https://github.com/cbeams/spring-3.1-profiles-xml. If you're not familiar with Git, the README has instructions for…

Second in a series of posts on "Spring 3 Simplifications" started yesterday by Keith, I'd like to provide a very brief and hands-on introduction to Spring's new @Configuration annotation and related support. As those that followed the Spring JavaConfig project will know, a @Configuration-annotated class serves much the same role as a Spring XML file. It provides a code-centric way of declaring Spring bean definitions using nothing more than methods and annotations. You might call it Plain Old Configuration* :) This means that for simple situations, no XML will be required! Let's get started…

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. 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…

Today marks the third milestone release of the Spring Java Configuration project (JavaConfig for short). The release contains numerous bug fixes and new features - I'll highlight a few of the most interesting changes below, but first let me give a quick refresher as to what JavaConfig is all about. If you have any experience with Spring, the following snippet of XML configuration will likely be familiar. Let's assume we're looking at a file named application-config.xml: Of course, this XML configuration will ultimately serve as a set of instructions for a Spring ApplicationContext to…