November 19th 2007 was a big day for the Spring Framework. Spring 2.5 was released, Interface21 has become SpringSource and InfoQ has published the first article in a series of articles by Mark Fisher of SpringSource on the new features: What's New in Spring 2.5: Part 1: Annotation-Based Configuration.
Describing the series of articles, Mark Fisher wrote:
The newly released Spring 2.5 continues this trend by offering further simplifications and powerful new features especially for those who are using Java 5 or greater. These features include annotation-driven dependency injection, auto-detection of Spring components on the classpath using annotations rather than XML for metadata, annotation support for lifecycle methods, a new web controller model for mapping requests to annotated methods, support for Junit 4 in the test framework, new additions to the Spring XML namespaces, and more.
This article is the first of a three-part series exploring these new features. The current article will focus on simplified configuration and new annotation-based functionality in the core of the Spring application context. The second article will cover new features available in the web-tier, and the final article will highlight additional features available for integration and testing.
If you're currently using the Spring Framework, this is a good opportunity to read about the new features and decide if there's a compelling reason to upgrade. If you're not using the Spring Framework, but considering it, this is a good opportunity to learn about some of the new features that may make your decision easier, or harder. Either way, the Spring Framework is a big part of how many people assemble their Java enterprise applications and Mark Fisher will help guide you through the new features in this article and the two parts yet to come.