In the last session of SpringOne yesterday, Dave Syer, Scott Wintermute, Lucas Ward and Wayne Lund all presented on Spring Batch. I didn't actually attend (since I had an early cab ride), but I stuck my head in and was yet again astounded by the amount of interest.

Back at JavaOne we had an immense amount of interest in this solution as well, with plenty of visitors calling by the booth to quiz us about batch.

It's all too easy in this world of Ajax and Rich Internet Applications to forget that a large number (a majority maybe?) of large scale enterprise applications are batch-oriented. Batch…

Load testing a Web Flow application is similar to load testing any other web application – we'll use a load testing tool to simulate increasing levels of concurrent client access in order to capture essential performance statistics.

With Web Flow there will be a couple of important considerations for the load test:

1. The load test must maintain independent “cookie storage area” so each client request can carry an independent HTTP session.
2. We need a mechanism for extracting the unique flow execution key from the initial response and use it to customize subsequent requests in the same flow session.

Apache JMeter is an open-source performance test tool that can satisfy both considerations.

For 1) we add an HTTP Cookie Manager element at the root of each Test Group exercising Web Flow functionality. The Cookie Manager ensures each simulated client request can have its own…

SpringOne is humming along nicely. This year it's a 3 day show, up from 2 days last year, and once again it's great to see hundreds of attendees at a Spring conference. For once I'm quite relaxed at a show, as after the opening keynote I have no further sessions, and don't need to work on slides.

Right now, Adrian is preparing to make a major announcement about Spring tooling. Well actually he's giving a uniquely personal take on duck typing, as I'm sure you'll hear...

More about that later, but first I need to share some news from yesterday. I was happy to be able to announce that we have…

Yesterday, Joris and I gave a session at the Dutch Java Users Group. We did the session twice and had about 250 people in total attending the sessions. A lot of people asked for the code for the demos we did during the sessions. Attached you'll find the code for the AOP and Dependency Injection demos. It shows a simple aspect flushing the Hibernate session before every JDBC operation (not as robust as you'd want it in production code, but it's a start) and it also shows the CarPlant system (demo'd before in other sessions and previously attached to another blog entry) configured using the…

Yesterday GigaSpaces announced the latest release of their Space-Based Architecture, and it's got a new name to go with it too: the GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP). To quote from their press release:

The new release provides a complete middleware platform for managing data, messaging and business logic for applications that require high performance and the ability to scale horizontally across hundreds of machines.

As part of the new product release, GigaSpaces has embraced a much simpler, non-intrusive programming model that allows developers to write their applications in Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs), plain .Net and plain C++ objects. For Java, GigaSpaces is achieving this by supporting the Spring Framework, which is rapidly becoming the de-facto standard in Enterprise Java programming.

Announcements like this are part of a virtuous circle (described for example by Geoffrey Moore in his book "The Gorilla Game") whereby the pervasiveness of the Spring Framework makes it very compelling for vendors to provide Spring Framework integration in their products, which in turn increases the overall value of Spring. This of course helps to make Spring even more pervasive…

The production of nonsense on open source is a highly competitive field. However, I've just come across something that raises (lowers?) the bar: a post by an OpenLogic blogger entitled What's your time worth?

It's not a long piece, which is handy, as it makes it easier to deconstruct paragraph by paragraph. I'm focusing on enterprise Java, about which I can speak from experience.

The blogger gets to the point right away with a concise statement of why she doesn't understand open source in the enterprise:

Developers that work on open source software typically have day jobs that pay pretty well. So they work on open source software for free and write code during the day for big bucks.

The post now moves onto economics--or, to be precise, an attempt to argue that the…

Last month I gave a Core Spring training in Turkey. At the end of the course I discussed the architecture for an application that some of the participants were going to build after completing the course. This application would consist of an ear file with several war files inside, and the question came up if it was possible to define a single ApplicationContext that could be used as a shared parent to the WebApplicationContexts of all war files. This context would hold bean definitions for services, DAOs and other beans that were not specific to a single web module.

Actually, Spring makes it…

I was working on Spring 2.1 stuff this week with Joris. We were preparing a sample using all three ways of doing dependency injection. The sample does not only highlight dependency injection, but also features a back-end based on Hibernate.

Several features in Spring 2.1 require the ASM byte code manipulation framework. Hibernate also uses ASM, through CGLIB. There is a binary incompatibility between ASM 1.5.3 and 2.2.3. The former is used by Hibernate, the latter is used by Spring in various scenarios; specifically in some of the AOP functionality and the new @Autowired features.

UPDATE: read…

Doing it again It’s already over 2 years since the idea to launch a European conference dedicated to the ever-growing Spring community was first discussed. After having announced the first (2006) edition of SpringOne at JavaPolis 2005, over 400 people signed up for the conference – over 20% more than we anticipated. SpringOne 2006 was a great success.

Due to the piles of positive feedback we have received after the 2006 edition, with many attendees reacting very positively to the strong focus on Spring and enterprise Java, we decided about 7 months ago to organize a 2007 edition. The…