sampa : colin’s blog

Spring has from the beginning provided a powerful transaction abstraction. This abstraction provides several key benefits:

Allows you to specify transaction demaraction policies for your code, either declaratively or programatically.
Abstracts away the low-level transaction manager with a common transaction management abstraction, allowing for you to change TX strategies (for example, JTA (global) vs. local transactions) without […]

I was born in Eastern Europe, but grew up in Canada. Partially because of my background, and also for tourism/business, I’ve visited Europe a decent amount.
I’ve always though Europe was a bit more civilized (in the ways that matter to me) than North America. Take the transit situation; there are only a a half a […]

On May 25th, the Los Angeles Java Users Group will hold a special meeting where I’ll be presenting on the Spring Framework.
Since there are still a decent number of people without hands-on Spring Framework experience, I’ll for the most part be doing a general Spring overview which walks through most of the features, and should […]

Spring Framework 1.2 final is out. This release definitely has a focus on persistence related enhancements. Read the announcement here.

Now that Ivy 1.0 is out, I’d strongly encourage every Java developer to pull it down and consider using it to manage dependencies in their Ant builds. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a complete no-brainer.
Ivy does one thing, manage dependencies, and does it quite well. What’s nice is that it has a decent set […]

The new alias tag in Spring’s XML bean definition format makes using Spring in a (lightweight) component oriented fashion significantly easier.
Spring has always had the ability to assign multiple IDs to components (via combined usage of the id and name attributes) which made it possible to link up components somewhat. Consider a library called ComponentA. […]

I’m very pleased to announce that Spring Framework 1.2RC1 is now available for download! Thanks again to Juergen for all the gruntwork packaging things up.
While this is only a Release Candidate, and you can expect (despite the name) that at least one or two other Release Candiate builds will come out before 1.2 final, […]

I’ve been working with an ant-based dependency management tool called Ivy:
http://www.jayasoft.fr/org/modules/ivy/overview.php
We’ve been talking about restructuring the Spring Framework source layout at some point relatively soon (although it almost certainly won’t happen for 1.2), so that the individual components of Spring each have their own source level projects, instead of living under one big fat project […]

The wireless network connectivity here at the TSS Symposium is simply unbelievably bad. Signal strength is consistently good, but much (most) of the time, you can not connect, or once you have a connection, you can count on it being unusable after a few minutes. I think it’s a matter of just too much contention […]

If you’re attending The ServerSide Symposium 2005, and you’re interested in Spring, you might want to attend the Spring BOF on Friday night (the 4th) at 7:30:
http://symposiumwiki.theserverside.com/tsswiki/display/symposium2005/Meetings+and+BOFS
This is a chance to meet most of the core Spring developers (Juergen being the big exception, unfortunately), and talk about new features and Spring in general.

(Updated 2005-3-26: The new Skype 1.2 can now export/import contacts in vCard format, making most of this post irrelevant.)
My partners and I use Skype pretty heavily to do calls and conference calls via Voice Over IP, as we’re all located in different countries.
One annoying thing about Skype though, is that as opposed to most IM […]

Most Eclipse users have probably missed the lack of any decent built-in XML, JSP, or HTML editors in Eclipse. There were a few completely free and open-source options which didn’t work too well or were not powerful enough, along with some free or low-cost options which were anywhere from a bit to a lot better […]

Most Eclipse users end up using at least a few plugins to add some functionality to Eclipse. There are a few techniques which make working with plugins much easier, in terms of management, sharing between multiple simultaneous Eclipse installs, and ease of upgrade from one Eclipse version to another.
My #1 suggestion is to never install […]

Spring Framework 1.1.2 has been relased.
Take a look at the announcement for major new features. There is also a more detailed full changelog.
As always, thanks to Juergen for the packaging gruntwork.

Darren Davison’s Beandoc tool for getting a better view of a Spring application context is way cool!:
http://www.davison.uk.net/beandoc/
This is definitely worth including with Spring or as a related project.
Here’s his spring-developer mail list comment about it:
I’ve done a bit of work on a tool to document and graph context files. It
still needs some work in […]

I’ve had J.B. Rainsberger’s excellent book, JUnit Recipes, for 3-4 days now, and have been taking a look at it whenever I feel like taking a break for a few minutes.
This is a really good book, in ‘recipe’ format, that shows examples for using JUnit to handle most types of unit or integration testing […]

Here’s the announcement and more detailed changelog.
Thanks to Juergen for the packaging work (never mind his coding prowess ).

There’s already a lot of buzz around the leaked information that the JSR-220 (EJB 3) expert group will now be joined by a number of key JDO people, and will be producing a spec for a persistence API which runs both in an EJB container (as before) and outside (J2SE).
I think having a good, standard, […]

Filed under the “I feel like screaming” category… While I was away (of course it had to happen then) for a couple of weeks in Romania and had dial-up access at best, some porn spam robot started hitting the Spring forums (which run on phpBB), and registering bogus users, at the rate of several per […]

For legacy reasons, mandated technology reasons, or the need to do clustered remote access, a number of people do need to use EJBs with Spring, whether they want to or not.
The existing ejbtest integration test app under the autobuilds directory in the Spring source tree was originally created to be used for integration level testing […]