Spring has rich support for transaction management through its PlatformTransactionManager interface and the hierarchy of implementations. Spring's transaction support provides a consistent interface for the transactional semantics of numerous APIs. Broadly, transactions can be split into two categories: local transactions and global transactions. Local transactions are those that affect only one transaction resource. Most often, Read more…

I looked at what a basic FactoryBean is in my previous post. While FactoryBeans are important – and knowing what they do can help you navigate the framework more effectively – they're by and large no longer the recommended approach to the task as of Spring 3.0 and the imminent Spring 3.1. The whole point Read more…

In this post, I'll look at Spring's org.springframework.beans.factory.FactoryBean<T> interface. The definition of this interface is: A FactoryBean is a pattern to encapsulate interesting object construction logic in a class. It might be used, for example, to encode the construction of a complex object graph in a reusable way. Often this is used to construct complex Read more…

In a previous article, Behind the Spring Security Namespace, I talked about how the Spring Security namespace has been very successful in providing a simple alternative to plain Spring bean configuration, but how there is still a steep learning curve when you want to start customizing its behaviour. Behind the XML elements and attributes, various Read more…

Scenario: you want to contribute some code to an open source project hosted on a public git repository service like github. Lots of people make pull requests to projects I'm involved in and many times they are more complicated to merge than they need to be, which slows down the process a bit. The basic Read more…

As Jürgen Höller mentioned in his post announcing the release of Spring 3.1 M2, the Spring TestContext Framework(*) has been overhauled to provide first-class testing support for @Configuration classes and environment profiles. In this post I'll first walk you through some examples that demonstrate these new testing features. I'll then cover some of the new Read more…

Today I am proud to announce version 5 of our VMware vFabric™ application platform defining the future of enterprise Java for cloud and virtualized execution environments. vFabric blazes the path to new and modern cloud architectures by providing a modern programming model paired with next-generation platform services. A path that is not overgrown with the Read more…

This post focuses on what's new for Spring MVC in Spring 3.1 M2. Here are the topics: Code-based equivalent for the MVC namespace. Customizable @MVC processing. Programming model improvements. A brief reminder that the features discussed here are in action at the Greenhouse project. Code-based Configuration For Spring MVC As Chris pointed out in his Read more…

As Juergen mentioned in his post yesterday, and as I've mentioned in my previous posts on 3.1 M1, one of the major themes of Spring 3.1 is completing our vision for code-based configuration in Spring. We think a modern enterprise Java application should have a choice between Java and XML as first class options for Read more…

Spring Framework 3.1 M2 has been released this week, marking the end of the 3.1 milestone phase. We are moving on to the release candidate phase now, preparing for a feature-complete RC1 in July and a GA release in September. 3.1 M2 completes the work on several major themes started in 3.1 M1 back in Read more…