Spring 2.5 is out

Spring 2.5 has been officially released. Version 2.5 is still compatible with Java 1.4.2+ and J2EE 1.3+. If you want to get up to speed quickly on what I consider the biggest change, the introduction of annotations for configuring the IoC container, I recommend What’s New in Spring 2.5: Part 1, which gives a thorough account. In other Spring news, the company has been renamed from Interface 21 to SpringSource. It’s the company that backs the Spring framework commercially.

What’s new in version 2.5

• Full Java 6 and Java EE 5 support (JDBC 4.0, JTA 1.1, JavaMail 1.4, JAX-WS 2.0)
• Full-featured annotation-driven dependency injection, including support for ‘qualifiers’
• Support for auto-detecting application components in the classpath and auto-configuring them as Spring managed objects
• A new bean name pointcut element in AspectJ pointcut expressions
• Built-in support for AspectJ load-time weaving based on the LoadTimeWeaver abstraction
• New XML configuration namespaces “context” and “jms”, for maximum convenience
• A completely revised integration test framework, with first-class support for JUnit 4 and TestNG
• A new annotation-based controller model for Spring MVC supporting Servlet and Portlet environments
• Extended SimpleJdbcTemplate functionality, including support for named SQL parameters
• Officially certified WebSphere support
• The packaging of Spring Framework jars as OSGi-compliant bundles out of the box
• The ability to deploy a Spring ApplicationContext as a JCA RAR file, for headless application modules
• JCA 1.5 message endpoint management, for Spring-managed JMS and CCI message listeners

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