If you've followed October's Spring 2.0 release, you will know that one of the big new features was XML extension name spaces: the ability to define new XML elements and attributes that generate Spring metadata, and can be used alongside regular bean definitions. This provides a valuable new extension point and makes Spring configuration both more simpler to use for many repeated tasks and more powerful. However, there is also a sweet little piece of syntax sugar that you may not have noticed--probably because no one in the Spring team has gotten around to telling you... Having promised myself…

I am regularly asked about the origin of the name “Spring.” The name goes back to late 2002. In November 2002, I published Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development. The book was accompanied by 30,000 lines of framework code, which had accounted for a good deal of the year full-time I put into writing the book. (Writing a 750 page book is enough work on its own; writing a substantial framework to go along with it is sheer masochism. It was hard.) Many of the fundamental concepts of the Spring Framework were there: an already capable IoC container, with BeanFactory and ApplicationContext…

I was in San Francisco for Oracle World. I even spoke briefly in Thomas Kurian's keynote on Java middleware. But Neelan and I had to leave on Tuesday and missed the Big Deal: Larry Ellison announcing that Oracle are offering support for Linux. This is an interesting event from the perspective of the open source business. What are the wider implications? Oracle are offering support for an open source product that they did not create and don't control. This is possible for a number of reasons: However, it's interesting to think about what the limits are for companies such as Oracle in providing…

Spring 2.0 went final on Tuesday! This is the product of 9 months of hard work from the Spring team, and huge amounts of user feedback (thanks!) and it's a big step forward. I promise my next blog will be about something other than download numbers. I've been playing around with some interesting approaches to testing pointcuts in @AspectJ annotations, so I'm hoping next time to post some interesting code. But we just noticed some pretty amazing figures from SourceForge, so I can't resist posting about them. There were over 10,000 downloads of Spring 2.0 in the first 24 hours! Interest in…

Welcome to my new blog! I haven't blogged since August 2004, but have been inspired by our new team blog to try to lift my game. I've also been shamed by the blog-energy of my colleagues. I'm very excited about a lot of topics at the moment, and promise to blog much more often than once every 2 years in future... Stay tuned for my thoughts about Spring 2.0 and beyond, OO design, AOP, and the future of enterprise Java. In the meantime, I'll share my travel schedule for the next few months (which will at least give me an excuse for not always posting regularly):

A couple of weeks ago, the Spring Framework project passed 1 million downloads from its home on SourceForge. The true total is probably much higher, as this figure does not include nightly builds or the other sites from which Spring can be downloaded. And, of course, Spring is included in the distributions of a large and growing range of other products. And then there's Spring.NET... Most important, Spring continues to gain momentum: the numbers are growing very rapidly. The most downloaded version of Spring is the most recent production release, 1.2.8, which has been downloaded 175,000 times…

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…