A little later than expected, but very much worth the delay. Juergen has now pinpointed the exact moment that Spring 2.0 FINAL will be released.
I've been using various milestones, nightly builds, and release candidates of Spring 2.0 since it was released shortly after The Spring Experience last year. It's all very good stuff:
- XML Schema support, which means simplified configuration of AOP, transactions, JEE stuffs, dynamic scripting, and other stuff. And it's easy to add your own extensions to Spring configuration.
- AOP is greatly simplified with the new <aop:???/> namespace and support for @AspectJ annotations.
- Ability for Spring to inject objects that it doesn't create. Great for injection into domain objects.
- Asynchronous message consumption with honest-to-goodness message-driven POJO support.
- Bean scoping-Not just singleton and prototype. Now we have session and request. And you can easily create custom scopes.
- JPA support
- Dynamic language support so that you can script your beans in Ruby, Groovy, or BeanShell.
- New form-binding JSP tag library. No more messy <spring:bind>.
- Portlet MVC framework similar to Spring's servlet-based MVC framework.
- New JDBC templates for Java 5 and named parameters.
- And a bunch of other stuff...
I doubt that I'll be up at 3am on Monday (I live in Texas) to download it...but it'll be at the top of my to-do list for Monday.
