A Look Forward at Spring 3.0

In this presentation, recorded at a recent Spring User Group Meeting by Skills Matter, Rick Evans talks about the new weapons provided by Spring 3.0 for the war on Java complexity. After a brief recap of Spring 2.5, he introduces the first weapon: Spring 3.0 is totally embracing Java 5. It requires at least Java 5, the code base is generified and lots of cruft is removed by making use of Java 5 features.

The Spring Expression Language (SPEL) is another powerful feature of Spring 3.0. Rick shows some examples that demonstrate how the new language looks for both the XML and the annotation ways of coding.

REST support by means of additions to the MVC API is the next topic. Both the components at the server side and at the client side for developing RESTful applications are explained one code example. In regards of Spring Web MVC, there are two new View implementations, namely: AbstractRssFeedView and AbstractAtomFeedView. @RequestParam now supports a default value; @RequestHeader annotation is introduced and there is a new tag in the form library. Rick reviews the deprecated & removed features of 3.0 in addition to those that are likely to be phased out gradually in the future. He concludes by talking about the new structure of the overall Spring Project and shows the release schedule for Spring 3.0.

The Spring Framework 3.0 M1 can be downloaded here.