I’m pleased to announce a two-day training course in basic Spring web application development to be held on March 13-14th, 2007. I’m writing and will be teching this course together with Joel Confino of Chariot Solutions. Joel is a Java EE architect and Spring enthusiast with lots of experience developing Java applications.

This training course is written FOR DEVELOPERS, BY DEVELOPERS. It is hands-on and interactive. You will be writing code!

Spring Kickstart is a two-day training course covering:

• The Spring Lightweight Container including the Bean Factory and Application Context
• Data access with JPA and the JDBC Template
• Transactions, AOP, and JMX: Adding powerful services to your POJOs
• Spring MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework for creating Web applications
• Third-party web framework integration using Struts and JSF
• Learn the many new features in the Spring Framework version 2.0

The format is approximately 50% lecture and 50% lab work. With 2 instructors, you’ll benefit from a low instructor-to-student ratio and be able to get your questions answered one-on-one.

Register at: http://www.chariotsolutions.com/spring

The course will be held in the magnificent Hub CityView meeting space conveniently located in Center City Philadelphia only 1.5 blocks from Suburban Station. Breakfast, lunch and refreshments are included on both days.

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.

Saw that Craig’s Spring in Action is available in Chinese and Portugese. Looks like our book is available in Chinese as well.

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.

Spring 1.2.6 has just been released. This is a bugfix and minor enhancement release, fixing a number of issues found in previous 1.2.x releases and introducing various minor new features. Read more here.

The Philadelphia Spring Users Group held its first meeting on October 27th in Fort Washington, PA. For presentation slides and sample code plus a few pictures go to the meeting page. For more information about this group join the mailing list.

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.

Spring 1.2.5 has just been released. This is a bugfix and minor enhancement release. Read more here.