Spring Framework 2.5 RC1 Released

In case you haven’t heard, the Spring folks recently announced their 2.5 RC1 release. Some of the more notable improvements include:

• annotation driven dependency injection support and the ability to scan annotated components in the classpath
  – lots of ideas taken from Guice for this, has to potential to significantly cut down on and/or eliminate Spring configuration files, and we can finally lay XDoclet to rest

• JCA 1.5 message endpoint management (for Spring-managed JMS and CCI message listeners)
  – I haven’t looked into it much, but this appears to be Spring’s answer to MDBs

• Spring 2.5 is designed as a drop-in replacement for Spring 2.0, except for the slightly restructured jar file contents (see the readme file in the distribution).
  – and they are highly encouraging 2.0.x users to upgrade

And it’s also worth pointing out that it maintains JDK 1.4 compatibility and comes with officially certified WebSphere support.

Very nice stuff, well worth a look.