It's time for the next Java Meetup again. I decided to postpone the 7th installment of this quarterly event in Amsterdam until right after summer, because most people here in The Netherlands take a couple of weeks off in August or so.

I've looked at our internal schedules and it seems September 21st is the only day left in September, so I hope it fits with other people's schedules as well.

We'll be doing it at the same location as last April's meetup, as this is pretty convenient for us and everybody seems to be fine with it. The first Java Meetup ever was held in my favorite Amsterdam hangout…

Dear Spring Community,

I'm pleased to announce that Spring 2.1 M3 has been released!

This is the third milestone release in the Spring 2.1 series, introducing autowiring for collections, the "bean(name)" pointcut element, various JDBC enhancements, JRuby 1.0 support and many refinements all over the framework.

Please see the changelog and JIRA roadmap for more details on the new features introduced in this release.

FYI, we have also released 2.0.7 snapshots, containing backported fixes from 2.1 M3. Please give a recent snapshot a try as a drop-in replacement for 2.0.5/2.0.6! The official 2.0.7 release is scheduled for August 15th. 

Enjoy, 

Juergen Hoeller
Lead, Spring Framework Development
Interface21 - http://www.interface21.com

In a recent blog entry Marc Logemann touches on the subject of proxy performance. In his entry he asks for a white paper by 'the Spring guys'. I don't want to spend (p)ages and (p)ages on discussing the differences up to the nanosecond between proxies and byte code weaving mechanisms, but I do think it's valuable to re-iterate once again what the differences are and whether or not this discussion matters at all.

What are proxies and why do we use them?

Let's first shortly revisit what proxies are used for (in general, and in Spring). According the Gang of Four (GoF) book on Design Patterns a proxy is a surrogate object or placeholder for another object to control access to it. Because the proxy sits in between the caller of an object and the real object itself, it can decide to prevent the real (or target) object from being invoked, or do something before the target object is invoked.

In other words, proxies can be used as stand-ins for real objects to apply extra behavior to those objects--be it security-related behavior, caching or maybe performance measurements…

Introduction

Grails seems to be going from strength to strength, and it looks like it definitely "has legs", as they say. I am quite interested in stretching those legs a little outside the web application arena. If you are aware of my work on Spring Batch, you will probably be able to guess where that might take me. But for this article I wanted to just share some experiences I've had with the basic, low-level deployment and build of a Grails application.

I have a love/hate relationship with Maven 2, and I am learning to love Grails, but sadly the two do not play particularly well together. It would…

A couple of month ago, we start publishing polls on www.springframework.org asking people to provide their feedback about Spring, some of its features and how they are using those features. The first question I posted was whether or not people were checking required dependencies and if so, what mechanisms they used. I quickly followed up on this question asking the community what transaction management strategy it used.

To my delight when I first checked the results, back in March, a lot of people told us by voting in the first poll that they were using the @Required annotation. The second…

The Java EE 6 proposal (JSR 316) was published today. I believe that this will be the most important revision of the platform since it was released nearly 10 years ago, and that it should be welcomed by users of the technology. Interface21 is happy to be a supporter of this JSR, and I am looking forward to contributing to it.

Java EE (known as J2EE for most of its history) has played a valuable role in creating a market for Java middleware. However, over those 10 years, important issues have emerged with the platform, such as:

• The need for a Java EE compliant server to be bloated with a range of functionality that is of little interest to the vast majority of users
• The fact that enterprise requirements have changed since J2EE was envisaged and that a "one size fits all model" is less and less appropriate
• The fact that enterprise Java has been greatly strengthened by the emergence of frameworks (especially in open source) that make developers more productive and their production applications more efficient and maintainable
• New challenges such as Ruby on Rails, and even .NET, showing that, in a time of rapid change and innovation, a cosy 2-3 year release cycle imperils the entire platform

Java EE 6 is an important revision of the platform that has the…

Michael Hickins recently published a piece on eWeek entitled Is Open Source Dying? The title drew me in, and no doubt plenty of other folk too. But the article doesn't prove the case, although it contains some interesting points that merit discussion.

Most of the article concerns speculation about the experience of government with open source, and the motives of vendors such as IBM. I prefer to judge companies and individuals by their actions, rather than speculation about their motives, and there is plenty of evidence that IBM, for example, takes open source very seriously. There's plenty of…

After fixing approximately 250 bugs and working uncountable hours on adding support for Spring 2.0, Spring Web Flow, Spring AOP and Spring JavaConfig, we are proud to announce the immediate availability of Spring IDE 2.0.

Download | Documentation | Changelog

The release is available from our release update site. Spring IDE 2.0 is licensed under the terms of the Eclipse Public License - v1.0.

New Features

Spring IDE 2.0 contains lots of new features and a bunch of bug fixes. A list of all closed tickets is available in our ticketing system. For those of you that are not familiar with recent development of Spring IDE here is a short list of features included:

• Support for Spring 2.0 namespace-based configurations. We have put lots of work into that to make the support as extensible as possible. You can read more about that in another post.
• Support for Spring Web Flow, including an extension to WTP’s XML editor for content assist and hyperlinking as well as validation and graphical editing. More information is available here.
• Tools for Spring AOP based development. This includes support for validating configurations (parsing of pointcut expressions) and visualization of cross cutting references based on <aop:config> and @AspectJ-style aspects.
• Support for Spring JavaConfig M2. This serves as sandbox for testing the extension points of Spring IDE’s core. Read more about that here and here.
• Usability and UI improvements: A new Spring Explorer that replaces the Beans View, Content contribution to the Eclipse’s Project Explorer, a Spring Working Set type to reduce cluttering in the Project and Spring Explorer, Refactoring participants for rename and move refactorings of Java Packages and Classes as well as Bean names, New Project and Spring Bean configuration file wizard.

Spring IDE 2.0 is compatible with upcoming Eclipse 3.3 (aka Eclipse Europa).

Read more at the Spring IDE Blog.

As promised to everyone in my sessions, here are all the code samples that I presented during the conference.

Concurrency and Spring JMX Dynamic Languages

Slides will be available from the SpringOne web site.