Spring co-founder Rod Johnson provides the definitive article on the motivations behind and uses of the new features in Spring 2.0. This first article covers the Spring core container, XML configuration extensions, AOP enhancements and Java 5-specific features.
Read Spring 2.0 What's New and Why it Matters
Read Spring 2.0 What's New and Why it Matters
What's the big picture in Spring 2.0? Rod provides a high level, after which zooming in on how to actually get started with each:
Spring is a featured topic on InfoQ for the next couple of months, you can see all of our in-depth Spring content at http://infoq.com/spring. Rod Johnson is also presenting on Spring 2 at QCon London (March 12-16).
- Configuration extensions: In Spring 2.0, Spring supports extensible XML configuration, enabling the development of custom elements that offer a new level of abstraction for generating Spring bean definitions. The XML extension mechanism also allows the provision of new tags to simplify many common tasks.
- Major enhancements in the AOP framework, which make it both more powerful and easier to use.
- Enhanced support for Java 5.
- The ability for Spring beans to be implemented in dynamic languages, such as Groovy, JRuby and Beanshell, while retaining all the services of the Spring component model, such as Dependency Injection, out of the box declarative services and AOP.
- Many new features including a Portlet MVC framework, "message driven POJOs," integration with new APIs including the Java Persistence API (JPA) and an asynchronous task execution framework.