The Spring Experience - Day 0

After a strange occurence at the airport on the way in (which somehow happened while I was there, yet I was unaware of); I've made it to The Spring Experience.

Not sure if I want to commit to reporting on what I see hear each day, but I figured I'd report back on the keynote of Day 0.

Knowing going in that the keynote was from Rod Johnson, I was kinda expecting a "state of the world" talk illustrating how Spring was going to save us all. Instead, what we got was a tagteam effort featuring Rod as the main contributor and MC.

Early on Rod let us in on the big news: Spring going 2.0. The plan is that 2.0 M1 will be released by the end of the conference - with an intention of having the legit 2.0 release in March ("Spring") of 2006.

Rob Harrop presented what sounds like the most impressive improvement in 2.0 : incredibly simplified tags for some of the most common xml work. If you've looked at these tags in the past you may think they're already pretty nice... you'll still be surprised at how slick the changes are.

Alef Arendsen demonstrated all of the changes that will be required to upgrade a Spring application to the 2.0 jars... nothing. He swapped in the new jars and illustrated that the jPetStore app (modified from Clinton Begin's version) worked with absolutely no changes. Another 45 seconds later he had swapped in the simplified xml changes that Rob had just demonstrated: again, no problems encountered. Both Alef and Rod repeatedly said that they still have much testing and verification to do but that they know of nothing that would require change on an upgrade to 2.0.

Keith Donald then gave a great demo on Spring Webflow, of which he's co-lead. "Conducting a logical conversation with the server to perform a complete transaction" pretty much summed it up. The demo was amazingly clean and concise, illustrating the independence of flow logic from the rest of the application. In fact, flow logic was even kept independant of other (sub) flow logic... real slick - I am going to be facing a tough decision tomorrow as Keith's session on the topic conflicts with Matt Raible's session on "TDD with Spring and Hibernate" which was one of my "must see" sessions coming into the show.

Anyway, that's my story.