Spring в действии. Второе издание (Часть 1. Ядро Spring)

Spring in Action. Second Edition (Part 1. Core Spring)

Preface

It was December 7, 2005. I was standing at the side of a large hotel meeting room

in Miami Beach, Florida. The room was filled with developers from all over the

world who had descended upon the beautiful sandy beaches of southern Florida

for a single purpose: to talk about Spring.

What can I say? It was a room full of nerds. Rather than soak in the sun and

surf, we all gathered inside to bask in the warm glow of our laptop screens to learn

more about our beloved framework from those who know it best.

On that particular night, we were hanging on the words of Spring’s creator,

Rod Johnson, as he presented the opening keynote for the conference. He spoke

of Spring’s origins and the successes it had enjoyed. Then he invited a few members

of the Spring team to the podium to introduce new features that were to be

in the next version.

He wasn’t far into his presentation when Rod made an announcement that

caught everyone’s attention. We were all expecting these great new features to be

available in Spring 1.3, the supposed next version of Spring. Much to our surprise,

Rod informed us that there would be no Spring 1.3; the next version would be

Spring 2.0.

The decision to bump up the major version number of the next release isn’t

made lightly. Such an action connotes a significant advance in Spring. If the next

version of Spring would be 2.0, then we could expect major enhancements.

Indeed, ten months later, Spring 2.0 would be released with an abundance of new

capabilities, including:

• Simplified XML configuration and the option to create custom configuration elements

• Greatly simplified AOP and transactions

• Support for Java 5 annotations for declaring aspects, transactions, and required bean properties

• The ability to create beans from scripts written in JRuby, Groovy, or Bean-Shell

• New JDBC templates to support named parameters and Java 5 features

• Improved JMS support, including receiving messages asynchronously (for creating message-driven POJOs)