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.
The new BEA WebLogic 9.1 Server supports multiple programming models - number three on their list is Spring!
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.
There are some new JDBC features coming for the 1.3 version of Spring. The most interesting one is support for named parameters. This means that you can use more descriptive names instead of the question marks we have been using as the placeholders for our bind variables. Using this feature your queries can now look like the following example:
public List getPreferredBeer() {
Map params = new HashMap(2);
params.put("unwantedBrand", "Heineken");
params.put("maxPrice", new BigDecimal(25.00));
List l = getJdbcTemplate().queryForList(
"select id, price, brand from beers " +
"where price < :maxPrice and brand <> :unwantedBrand",
params);
return l;
}
You can read more about these changes in the Spring Framework 1.3 preview - new JDBC features document.
If you are really adventurous, download a preview spring-jdbc-preview-20050823.jar file and try it out yourself. Just place this jar file ahead of the spring.jar file on your classpath. This should work with any recent version of Spring. If you have any problems download the latest Spring nightly snapshot.
We are all going to Florida in December. Sign up for the first Spring-only conference ever. This is guaranteed to be a good time.
The Spring Experience will feature over 40 technically focused sessions across three (3) full days spanning four (4) parallel tracks covering effective web architecture, enterprise systems, and agile process. Featured speakers include core Spring developers Rod Johnson, Juergen Hoeller, Rob Harrop, Colin Sampaleanu, Keith Donald, Alef Arendsen, Ben Alex, and Jim Clark, as well as industry experts and distinguished authors Bruce Tate, Matt Raible, Craig Walls, Justin Gehtland, and Dion Almaer.
The slides from the “JDBC and Web Development with the Spring Framework” tutorial can now be downloaded as a zip file.
You can view the individual sections directly:
