Last week I attended a SpringDay in Brussels organized by Springsource. Speakers Alef Arendsen and Joris Kuipers were to talk about Spring 2.5 / 3.0 and the Spring DM server. Sounds very promising but it didn’t really start out good since only a handfull of people showed up and the speakers were a little to late. Well actually Alef didn’t show up at all …

Anyways the down to the tech stuff, the stuff that matters. Joris talked about what was new new in Spring 2.5 like the support for JSR-250 annotations, the spring-test enhancements and other features. Most of these topics are already cover in many articles and blogs over the web though.

A small portion of the slideshow covered what was to come with Spring 3.0. Some interesting topics were covered like the removal of of deprecated code from the spring library. If you are still extending spring mvc controllers then you might not want to switch to spring 3.0 because they will be removed according to Joris. Annotating your classes with the spring mvc annotation will be the preferred way to write a webapp with spring mvc 3.0. An other part which will be left out are the old junit 3.8 extension classes. You will have to go with the new junit 4.x testrunners instead.
Spring 3.0 will also support a new Spring Expression Language, Portlet 2.0 and REST support for Spring Web MVC.

The talk about the new spring 3 features was quite limited and I found far better information on the web like: here and on the site of Matt Raible. I also suggest you take a look on the fisheye of the springframework repo.

After a small break Joris continued the roadshow with the new springsource jewel: the spring dm server. A hands demonstration was shown, exactly the same like this webinar and like my previous blogpost. I suggest you take a quick look at that if you want to find out more about the spring dm server.

PS: Besides the slideshow and demo there was also some time for talking with the Springsource guys. Some interesting facts which I remembered were that Springsource is the company which is in the most interest groups like OSGi, JCP, etc. Adrian Colyer was a developer on the classloading mechanism of websphere but was afterwards hired by Springsource. The spring dm server future releases will support multiple ‘web’ modules, now you have to include all your view components in one module …