It's Wednesday night and the first day of The Spring Experience has concluded. Actually, it wasn't a full day...just a dinner and a keynote. But it was a keynote from Rod Johnson, so I guess that it wasn't just a keynote.
Rod's keynote is summarized as "where we've been and where we're going next". The big news is that Spring 1.3 has now been renamed to Spring 2.0. They (the Spring team) decided that Spring 1.3 was too much to simply be a point release. So, later this week Spring 2.0M1 will be released and they're targeting Spring 2.0 final for March 2006.
There are a lot of new features and conveniences appearing in Spring 2.0, most notable:
- Simpler and custom XML configuration (similar to what XBean offers).
- A lot of AOP enhancements thanks to Adrian Colyer's efforts. One thing that stuck out to me is the ability to use AspectJ-style aspects in Spring without going through the "ajc" compile step. Also the ability to define pointcuts using AspectJ pointcut syntax is really nice.
- Spring WebFlow. We've all known that it was coming in Spring 1.3...but now it's going to be part of Spring 2.0. (I spoke with Keith Donald afterwards and he informs me that Spring 2.0M1 also marks the release of Spring WebFlow 1.0M1).
Rod turned the podium over several times during his keynote to other Spring team members to demo their stuff. One of the demos was from Alef Arendsen where it was demonstrated that Spring 2.0 will be fully backward compatible with Spring 1.2.x. In other words, you won't have to change anything to start using Spring 2.0. But, Spring 2.0 offers some coolness that may tempt you to change some stuff anyway to take advantage of the new features.
Afterwards I stayed around for a bit and chatted with Rod, Colin Sampaleanu, Keith Donald, Rob Harrop, Adrian Colyer, and others. I also ran into Thomas Risberg in the hallway before the keynote and I saw Rick Hightower from across the room and intended to say "hi", but he disappeared before I got a chance.
I also chatted briefly with Matt Raible before Rod's keynote. As soon as Rod started talking Matt told us that he was going to have to blog about this, so he sat down to start blogging about Rod's keynote. Matt always scoops me on the good stories, but as of this moment, he hasn't added anything to his blog about TSE, so it looks like I've beat him to this one. Sorry Matt. I'm sure your blog about Rod's keynote will be more detailed...but mine was first! :-)
Tomorrow I'll try to blog again about the sessions I attend...stay tuned.
BTW, Jay tells me that some people are already asking where they can get one of those "got <beans>?" hats that I was sporting tonight. If you want one, there are two ways to get them. First, I gave 3 of them to Jay and he'll be giving them away as door prizes this week. But if you don't win or if you're not here at TSE, then you can e-mail me (beanhat _at_ habuma.com) to find out how to get your own "got <beans>?" hat.
