SpringOne 2010: What's New in Spring Framework 3.1

I spent the second-last week of October at SpringOne 2GX 2010 in Chicago and I thought some of you might get something useful out of my notes. These aren’t my complete reinterpretations of every slide, but just things I jotted down that I thought were interesting enough to remember or look into further.

What’s New in Spring Framework 3.1
presented by Juergen Hoeller

Juergen started off with a review of the new features that were added in 3.0
(I’ve only noted down things that I’m not already using but thought are probably worth trying out)

• Expression Language
• Composition of Spring annotations into meta-annotations
• Java-based container configuration
• Spring MVC annotations for custom binding/formatting

Next was what’s coming in 3.1...

• Servlet 3.0 (I didn't know much about this, but there was a good overview at JavaOne [PDF])
• 'Environment Profiles' will allow for placeholder resolution based on a specified environment name (or names). This allows different configuration in, for example, dev and production, without having two different deployment artifacts. I think he also mentioned an Environment abstraction, which I assume would be for accessing the same configuration programatically.
  
• They are putting some effort towards bringing convenience of specialised namespace XML elements, e.g. the task: namespace, to the annotation-based Java config
• An abstraction for Cache implementations (including implementations for EHCache and GemFire to begin with), along with a @Cacheable annotation for aspect-oriented caching.
  

Lastly, he covered the main points that are currently on the cards for 3.2 ...

• Java SE 7 support
• APIs for taking advantage of multi-core concurrency