Spring has been around for quite a while now. I guess most projects still use XML for the config, but with the 2.5 release that will probably change. Alef Arendsen has a blogpost with links to a lot of resources about the new features, and upcoming ones.
Update: Spring JavaConfig M3 is released.
I’m mostly doing batch these days, so I’m keeping an eye out for what’s happening with Spring Batch. It does have a lot of concepts that resemble what our home grown framework is built around, so I can relate to a lot of it. The same reason will also hopefully make us able to migrate to it in a little while. Given the excellent track record of the Spring portfolio of frameworks, I have no doubt that migrating to it will reduce and improve our code.
To check out some comments about the further process and an explanation of some of the core concepts, check out this blog entry.
For quite a while now I have been spending way too much mind capacity on how to handle source when it comes to team-dependencies, library dependencies and database dependencies. There is certainly not a one size fits all solution out there, but Henrik Kniberg has a good introduction to the mailine model for handling source code.
I’m not convinced, but most of my scepticism could be written off to my mergophobia. It is mainly because I havn’t had the chance to practice it, and it is really something you need to have in your toolbox to be agile. I suspect many others share my phobia. On previous projects it has been sort of a pet peeve for me to point out that we should practice release-branches and fixes when we have the time. Not when everything else is burning like hell. Never really got there though.
We’ll scepticism aside. I guess my new years resolution (I just figured it out a month or two late) is to try more stuff without thinking it to pieces. I’ll probably get a lot more done that way. 🙂
BTW: QCon is on, and I’m not there. I had a blast there last year, so major envy to everyone that is.