Portability is a key factor in the Spring universe. We believe in portability at the framework level: Application components are written against a specific framework (or framework generation), such as Spring 2.5; the framework is then in turn responsible for adapting onto any underlying hosting environment. However, the specific application framework is above and distinct from the hosting environment. A brand-new framework version may be deployed onto an established generation of the hosting platform, as long as the fundamental capabilities of the environment are sufficient. This approach…

One of the central themes behind Spring 2.5 is comprehensive annotation-based configuration. We've been talking and blogging a lot about @Autowired, about Spring MVC's @RequestMapping and also about the new support for annotated tests written with JUnit4 or TestNG. @Autowired is certainly the central one of Spring 2.5's annotations, being available for use in service components, web components, unit tests - even domain objects when using Spring's @Configurable with AspectJ weaving. Spring MVC's @RequestMapping is equally flexible, supporting many variants of handler method signatures. Today I…

Spring 2.5 introduces an approach for writing annotated Web MVC controllers, which we haven't been blogging about much yet... I'll take the opportunity to give you an overview of what Spring MVC is really about these days. Spring MVC is essentially a request dispatcher framework, with a Servlet API variant and Portlet API variant. It operates very closely within its hosting environment - either Servlets or Portlets. Think about Spring MVC as providing foundational facilities and conveniences on top of the Servlet/Portlet container: e.g. flexible request mappings, separation between controller…

As some of you will have noticed already, Spring 2.5 RC1 has finally been released on Monday and is waiting for you to give it a test drive! Spring 2.5 is in many ways the release that completes Spring 2.0's mission: providing the most flexible and most comprehensive configuration model for both Java 1.4 and Java 5. Spring 2.5 focuses on particularly comprehensive support for Java 5, introducing various further annotations options. I'd like to take the opportunity to point out the unifying themes behind this release: Spring 2.5 allows for convenient externalized configuration while also…

My first blog post - and what a big announcement to make :-) After a series of Spring 2.1 milestone releases, we've been reviewing the overall set of features that we introduced: We concluded that this goes significantly beyond what we originally planned for Spring 2.1. The version number 2.1, as used for the milestones, does not reflect the significance and the comprehensiveness of the features in this major release. So I'm pleased to announce that the 2.1 milestones will seamlessly turn into Spring Framework 2.5 as the upcoming major release! Spring 2.5 is scheduled for final release in…