Spring 2.0 went final on Tuesday! This is the product of 9 months of hard work from the Spring team, and huge amounts of user feedback (thanks!) and it's a big step forward.

I promise my next blog will be about something other than download numbers. I've been playing around with some interesting approaches to testing pointcuts in @AspectJ annotations, so I'm hoping next time to post some interesting code.

But we just noticed some pretty amazing figures from SourceForge, so I can't resist posting about them. There were over 10,000 downloads of Spring 2.0 in the first 24 hours! Interest in Spring 2.0 has been building for months--with some users already in production with a release candidate, including a prominent media site in Europe--and I think Keith's brilliant launch page and countdown of last week topped it all off.

On the day, as Floyd pointed out on infoq, our servers went down several times because of the load. (The issue is now resolved.) This prompted Juergen to send around the following email to all at Interface21--quoted without his permission, but I hope he won't mind:

As Colin was saying: Let's be proud that our website is down because so many people are interested in what we have to offer!

Which is also why I won't mention the URL. DO NOT GO TO OUR WEBSITE. Suppress the desire, however urging it may be :-)

Now that 2.0 is out of the door, everyone in the Spring team is looking forward to the new possibilities it opens, such as OSGi integration. I had an interesting chat with Jeff Mcaffer and Tom Watson of IBM (and OSGi/Equinox) about this at JAOO yesterday, and it confirmed my view that there is a beautiful synergy between Spring and OSGi. It's great that Jeff, Tom and other OSGi community guys are also very interested in Spring integration, and it was great to have a discussion where we got down to looking at code in both projects within 10 minutes.

JAOO was great, although I missed out on visiting Charles Simonyi's 200 foot boat. Eberhard Wolff of Interface21 Germany and other track hosts did, and it was apparently pretty special.

I really enoy the mix of different areas at JAOO. It's great to get to chat to people from all kinds of different backgrounds. The folk I ended up drinking with spanned .NET, Ruby, C++ and agile. And it's always good to see that in Scandinavia there are a good proportion of female developers. I don't think it's healthy for any profession to be totally dominated by one gender.