Yesterday Interface21, the company behind the leading lightweight Java/JEE application framework, announced a preview release of version 2.1 of its Spring Framework. The release features enhanced support for Java annotations, as well as a continued commitment to enabling productivity gains and ease of use expected of Spring.
Initially billed as the lightweight replacement for heavyweight EJB based enterprise Java development, Spring has matured into a comprehensive application framework which still adheres to the principle that Java development should be simple yet powerful. Version 2.1 delivers on the ability to use XML to express application configuration information, through annotations or through a combination of the two. Certain pockets of the Java development community were quite vocal in their criticism of Sun for pushing annotations into Java 5 because they didn't necessarily provide support for pure metadata, but that's a narrow view of what annotations bring to the table. So even if they aren't ready to totally replace XML (it seems like XML just got here anyway...) a combination of the two is definitely capable of getting the job done.
The line on annotations includes some of the following:
- They fill in the blanks where the use of XML descriptors simply doesn't do the job/scale properly.
- They allow you to stay within the programming language of choice
- They tend to survive rounds of refactoring quite a bit better without getting lost and/or broken.
- Brings configuration and code closer together.
Also included in the 2.1 release is Spring Web Flow 1.1. This version aims to continue to strengthen the foundation set by the 1.0 baseline which was set loose towards the end of October 2006 and was Web Flow's first stable, production-grade release after nearly 2 years of development. Improvements in Webflow 1.1 will play a major role in defining what Spring provides as an enterprise application framework, especially considering the growing importance of web application development that depends being able to represent a variety of interrelated contextual application states. Other additions to Web Flow include tighter security integration, integrated Spring 2.0 custom scopes, and support for flow composition and inheritance.
I had the Spring 2.0 release marked as a turning point for the Spring community (and Interface21) because it really showed signs of differentiating itself as the open source JEE framework to beat. Even as other analysts and pundits were predicting the extinction of Enterprise Java at the hands of PHP, or other Web application frameworks like Ruby-on-Rails, I remained high on Spring due to its container agnostic nature and consistent approach to simplicity of design and architecture. It still stands, that applications built atop Spring can be engineered cost effectively and rapidly, don't require monstrous design patterns and don't constrict the use of related tools/other components.
Still we'll have to see where 2.1 puts things and the bar has been raised just that much higher.
Leave a comment