The Philadelphia Spring Users Group has been growing steadily. We now have close to 200 members on our mailing list and about 40-60 attendees for our meetings held every 2-3 months.

It is now time to kick it up a notch. We are, together with Chariot Solutions, arranging a FREE one-day Spring conference on September 26. The conference will be held at the Penn State Great Valley campus in Malvern, Pennsylvania which is just outside of Philadelphia.

Chariot Solutions have been organizing free conferences for a couple of years now, and this is a great way for the local Java community to be able to see industry leaders present on mostly open source related topics.

This time we will have over 15 speakers present on a range of topics including New Features in Spring 2.0, Aspect Oriented Programming, Spring Web Flow, Ajax & DWR and new support for Java Persistence API.

We have invited both members of the core Spring team, well known book authors and a number of local Spring experts to come and present on topics that they are interested in.

Speakers at this conference include
- Ramnivas Laddad, author of ‘AspectJ in Action’
- Keith Donald, Lead for Spring Web Flow
- Matt Raible, author of ‘Spring Live’
- Dain Sundstrom, Chief Architect for IBM Gluecode and Geronimo Committer
- Mike Keith, Co-spec Lead for JSR-220 EJB3

Did I mention that it’s FREE?

More information is available at http://springforward2006.com

It’s time for another trip down to Florida in December. Last years “Spring Experience” provided a great conference experience. It was all concentrated in a comfortable hotel over three action packed days. This year the event is held in Hollywood, FL and Jay Zimmerman from No Fluff Just Stuff has promised that we will get to spend time on the beach this year. He is even providing the beach towels. Should be a really fun event.

Time to start working on the presentation for SpringOne. There is quite a bit of O/R Mapping coverage, especially EJB3 persistence. Both Patrick Linskey and Mike Keith will present on this topic. So i decided to cover some JDBC techniques that can come in handy for tasks that are not suited for the O/R Mapping technologies. The title is “Spring JDBC — when ORM is not the best choice”. Should be interesting.

There has been quite a bit of activity around new features for Spring and the Spring team has now released the 2.0 M1 build that was announced at the Spring Experience. There is new simplified XML syntax based on XML Schema and much better AspectJ integration, plus lots of other features. Read more here.

BEA has announced support for Spring and they also provide a Spring download for easy integration with the WebLogic Server and the management console. Read more here.