I've recently finished up an interesting issue in Spring Web Flow. This issue (SWF-163) dealt with adding Spring 2.0 bean scoping support for Spring Web Flow's internal scopes. The implementation isn't really that interesting (the Scope interface is pretty easy to implement after all), but I wanted to mention exactly how you would use something like this in your application.

Spring 2.0 Scoping

With the latest snapshots of Spring Web Flow 1.1, we now see bean scopes for the three major Web Flow scopes, flash, flow, and conversation.

<bean id="sale" class="org.springframework.webflow.samples.sellitem.Sale…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring 2.0.5 has been released.  This is is a bugfix and enhancement release in the Spring 2.0 series, addressing all issues reported since 2.0.4 and introducing further concurrency improvements. We recommend to upgrade to Spring 2.0.5 from all previous 2.0.x releases.

Please see the changelog and JIRA roadmap for all the details of the 63 issues addressed in this release.

Juergen Hoeller
Lead, Spring Framework Development
Interface21 - http://www.interface21.com

Introduction

I've been working hard with a couple of clients on a new product called Spring Batch. The aim is to provide tools and applications to support bulk processing in an enterprise environment. Spring Batch is part of the Spring Portfolio with an initial release in the Spring 2.1 release train.

The original impetus to build some prototype code actually came independently from a number of Interface21 clients. This provides some useful additional detail and some constraints on the implementation so that it can be applied to the real-world problems posed by the clients. I hope that this article…

No, that's not my headline, it's actually the title of a white paper recently published by Open SOA collaboration. To quote from the news announcement accompanying the whitepaper:

"Based upon user feedback, the OSOA Collaboration are publishing a white paper highlighting the powerful combination of the SCA, Spring and OSGi technologies aimed to help Developers simplify the creation and composition of services critical to building applications based on an SOA approach."

The white paper provides a short overview of SCA, OSGi and Spring, and then describes how they can be used together. Quoting from the summary:

"SCA, OSGi and Spring are all useful and powerful facilities for the Java programmer to use. In the new service-oriented world that we are entering, using SCA, OSGi and Spring together provide powerful capabilities for building service implementations from sets of simple Java Beans using few APIs, with managed dependencies, version control and dynamic update capabilities, allied to the capability to compose those implementations with other service components written in Java or in other languages and existing in a distributed network of systems using a range of communication methods.

Simplicity, flexibility, manageability, testability, reusability. A key combination for enterprise developers."

In a previous post, I described how we use a custom ANT task to upload nightly snapshots from the ANT based projects in the Spring portfolio. In this post I'll describe how we use Amazon S3 to generate pages for the snapshots from each project and allow users to download the snapshots.

As I mentioned in the previous post, S3 is primarily used as a REST-ful service. This means that while I used Java for the upload portion, I was free to use other languages for the download portion. I chose to use PHP in this case because it was already available on the server I was working with, and was the…

One of the interesting side effects of a solid CI structure is that when things are running reliably, new problems start to crop up. Shortly after Spring's CI system started running smoothly, our occasional space and bandwidth issues on static.springframework.org became more pronounced. Colin Sampaleanu had done research earlier on how to alleviate some of these problems and had settled on Amazon S3.

Amazon S3 is part of the Amazon Web Services umbrella and provides an incredibly cheap online file storage service. What does 'incredibly cheap' mean? Well, from the website, it appears that…

This happened in Atlanta last week while I was in a Barnes & Noble bookstore. I circled around to the computer section and began scanning titles. With my head tilted I overheard a conversation about a job. I wasn't actively listening but I knew one side was pitching a job while the other was inquiring about it.

A couple of minutes later it was just me and the guy who was looking for talent. I was sure he would start speaking. Soon after he said 'so you're in J2EE?' and so the conversation began. He asked me about my work. He didn't know about Interface21 but upon hearing it's the company…

Following up on my post on WS-DuckTyping, I thought it would be interesting to show what support Spring Web Services offers for XPath. Some of these features are available right now, but most will be part of the RC1 release we will release later this month. Throughout this post I will be using the contacts xml file defined in item 35 of Effective XML, by Rusty Harold.

XPathExpression

Recently, I've added the XPathExpressionFactoryBean, to make it easier to inject XPath expressions into your beans, like so:

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/200…

Spring Web Flow, much like the Spring Framework itself, is a unique integration technology. Most of our users view it as a generic ApplicationController that can be embedded in any environment. We support Servlet and Portlet based applications, and ship integration with the leading web frameworks Struts, Spring MVC, and Java Server Faces. There are even teams I know of using Spring Web Flow in a Flex environment. In each of these environments, Spring Web Flow integrates to provide a better model for implementing navigation logic and managing application state.

Our users like this because…