Since the first milestones of Spring Dynamic Modules, requests for running web applications in OSGi started to come in. It has been probably one of the most requested features and no wonder, once 1.0 final was released, web support has been the main focus of the 1.1 branch. I am pleased to report that, with Read more…

Portability is a key factor in the Spring universe. We believe in portability at the framework level: Application components are written against a specific framework (or framework generation), such as Spring 2.5; the framework is then in turn responsible for adapting onto any underlying hosting environment. However, the specific application framework is above and distinct Read more…

I'm writing this as I'm on my way to Cairo. We're flying just West of Italy and I have clear view on the Italian coast line, with its blue waters and waves gently moving towards shore. It must be nice down there now. I'm heading to Cairo for a meeting of the Egyptian User Group, Read more…

One of the central themes behind Spring 2.5 is comprehensive annotation-based configuration. We've been talking and blogging a lot about @Autowired, about Spring MVC's @RequestMapping and also about the new support for annotated tests written with JUnit4 or TestNG. @Autowired is certainly the central one of Spring 2.5's annotations, being available for use in service Read more…

I am glad to report (along side Adrian) that after 3 milestones and 2 release candidates, Spring Dynamic Modules (formerly known as Spring OSGi) 1.0 has been released. A lot of features have been improved or added since my previous post (about 1.0 M1); I'll talk more about them in future entries (there is also Read more…

Spring's dependency injection (DI) mechanism allows configuring beans defined in application context. What if you want to extend the same idea to non-beans? Spring's support for domain object DI utilizes AspectJ weaving to extend DI to any object, even if it is created by, say, a web or an ORM framework. This enables creating domain Read more…

Since the introduction of Spring dynamic laguage support in Spring 2.0 it has been an attractive integration point for Groovy, and Groovy provides a rich environment for defining Domain Specific Languages (DSL). But the examples of Groovy integration in the Spring reference manual are limited in scope and do not show the features in Spring Read more…

Spring 2.5 introduces an approach for writing annotated Web MVC controllers, which we haven't been blogging about much yet… I'll take the opportunity to give you an overview of what Spring MVC is really about these days. Spring MVC is essentially a request dispatcher framework, with a Servlet API variant and Portlet API variant. It Read more…

Several users have asked whether we are committed to Spring Java Configuration, and how it sits with the annotation configuration option introduced in Spring 2.5. The answer is yes, we are committed to Java Config; and these two approaches are not mutually exclusive. These two configuration approaches are quite different: the @Autowired annotation in the Read more…

Spring 2.5 features a new pointcut designator — bean() that allows selecting join points in beans with a matching name pattern. Now it is possible to use the auto-proxy mechanism along with Spring-AspectJ integration to select a specific bean even when there are more than one beans of a type. Earlier, you could use BeanNameAutoProxyCreator Read more…