On the first day of Spring 2014 (even though some of you may feel winter will never end) I think it is a good time to talk about what is going on with the Spring Java Framework.
Over the past year there have been some big things going on with Spring, probably the chief among them the move in April 2013 to place Spring under the control of the new company GoPivotal. This spin-off from VMware, along with an investment from GE, is meant to support a new breed of applications where cloud and big data are a given not some afterthought on a platform not built for it. With the ever-expanding broad ecosystem of Spring-related projects, in addition to the immense popularity of the core Spring Framework, Spring seems a natural fit as an application framework to support this. Probably the most immediate change for those already using the Spring Framework day to day though was that there was a new web site to get Spring documentation, downloads, resources, etc:
Fast forward to the end of 2013 and we had the release of the Spring 4 Framework in December. The release of Spring 4 fits nicely with the desire to support more modern applications as support for many new technologies has been added. Among those are included support for Java EE 6 & 7, Java SE 8 (which was just released) and more recent versions of many optional third party libraries. Spring 4 is also a new foundation for the expanding list of Spring-related projects, the following just a few key ones to mention now:
- Spring Boot – Jumpstart on rapid development of Spring applications
- Spring Data – An umbrella project with a number of useful utilities for popular data access technologies like MongoDB, Hadoop, and JPA
- Spring XD – Unified system for big data ingestion, analytics, batch processing and export
- Spring Security – Application security framework
- Spring Mobile & Spring for Android – Support for developing mobile applications
- Spring Integration – Implementation of well-known enterprise integration patterns
- Spring Batch – Comprehensive batch application framework
- and several more
As you start to look at the Spring 4 Framework and what it can do for you, we at Web Age Solutions would like to assist you in that discovery. Below are some links to a webinar we will be giving next week on the changes in the Spring 4 release and a link to the new training category we have posted with Spring 4 training classes.
TRAINING CLASSES – Spring 4 Framework Training Classes
Here’s to hoping that your wait for using Spring 4 will not be as long as the wait for Spring 2014 has seemed!
