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Live from SpringOne 2008 - Collected bits about Spring 3.0
Posted on 06/12/08.I wouldn't go as far as to call the SpringSource team secretive, but they sure are building up tension with regards to the Spring 3.0. The talk I expected to provide a roadmap and feature summary actually did focus on version 2.5 feature. I wrote about some of the more interesting points here. I tried, however, to collect the various bits of information about the 3.0 release, so here you go (just remember that most of this could still be subject to change and shouldn't be considered official):
Timeline
According to Jürgen, there's the plan to have a first milestone by August 2008, although I've also heard July mentioned. If everything goes well, we might see a GA release late in Q4 2008.
Theme
Actually, Spring 3.0 will probably intensify what Spring 2.5 started: the embrace of the Java 5 programming model, this time to the extend that the Spring Core itself will be partially rearchitected and for the first time depend on Java 5. Internal (and gracefully downgrading) usage of Java 6 features will be expanded, although where and what was not announced. Also, there seems to be the trend to generalise certain parts of non-core modules in order to incorporate them into the core - for more about this see below.
Features
Well, there was not an aweful lot of information availabe about new features planned for 3.0 (with the exception of RESTful Spring, I'll blog about that later tonight when I've ordered my notes), but here you go:
- Full scale REST support by means of additions to the Spring MVC API - already pretty detailed, and apparently going to be included in the first milestone release
- Support Unified EL (as seen in Spring Web Flow) - very likely part of 3.0, but no details given
- Annotation support for declaring factory methods - as above
- Support for Portlet 2.0 (JSR 286), including resource requests (ResourceServingPortlet) - as above
- "Preparations" for Servlet 3.0 specification - sounded a lot like architectural preparations not visible to the "consumer"
- Something to fill the gap between Spring Web Flow and Spring MVC - that sounded very vague
- Inclusion (probably generalisation) of the repeat, retry and resume semantics provided by Spring Batch - was only hinted at, no details given
- Inclusion of the OXM support provided by Spring WS - sounded pretty definitive, but no details given
- Some kind of site definition language for the web stack - no idea whether this is more than a rumour
- Model-based validation for use both in server and client - as above
There's probably more planned, but I guess we'll have to wait for the first milestone to get a detailed roadmap.
Important changes
The one apparent and rather fundamental change is that Spring 3.0 will no longer run on Java 1.4. Apparently most of the core is refactored to use generics, enumerations and variable argument lists. Apart from that, some pruning is going to happen:
- Deprecated artifacts will be removed
- Some artifacts will probably marked as deprecated as of Spring 3.0, including the traditional Spring MVC controller hierarchy and the old JUnit 3.8 based integration test class hierarchy.
- Commons Attributes support will probably be removed because it doesn't make too much sense in a Java 5 environment
- Support for plain Toplink will probably removed from the core
According to Jürgen, the programming model itself will be 100% backwards compatible with Spring 2.5. The framework's extension points will, however, be pruned to accomodate for the fact that some of them won't make sense in a Java 5 environment. Jürgen mentioned 95% backwards compatibility with regards to extension points, so that shouldn't be much of an issue.
That's it for now, expect another posting about developing RESTful Spring applications with Spring 3.0 later tonight.
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