Alef Arendsen

Once again I’ll be heading to Costa Rica. I’ve just everything I need in the coming three weeks, which isn’t really much. Three shorts, six or seven t-shirts, a pair of jeans, some sunscreen and the equipment I have lying around for surfing (a leash, some wax and some other stuff).

After two weeks of traveling for Interface21 (a conference in Miami and one in Antwerp, Belgium), I’ll finally be enjoying the holiday I have looking forward to for so long.

Since this is the second time I’ll be visiting Costa Rica, things won’t be particularly new for me, but I don’t mind too much. We’ll probably be making the same trip as last year, starting in Tamarindo (up North), slowly travelling to the South, hoping to celebrate New-Years eve in Carate (although the Lookout Inn, at which we stayed last year appears to have no vacancies anymore). I sure have to drop by at Terry’s place though, since I left my shoes there last year, and he promised me he’d keep them around for me to pick them up .

I’ll be leaving tomorrow and will be flying out from Schiphol, traveling via JFK airport. I’ll be arriving around 9pm in San Jose.

I hope to post some more after I come back, which is early next year…

Yesterday, Erwin Vervaet and me did a 3-hour session on Spring in the Web Tier. We mainly focused on Spring MVC and Web Flow. The sample is online; you can get to it from the Spring Framework site.

The slides are here, in PDF format.

I made some last minute modifications to the slides for my sessions on Web Services and Remoting last Friday. The last version of the slides can be found at the following locations:

The Spring Experience – Spring & Remoting

The Spring Experience – Spring & Web Services

I’ve also updated the JPetStore sample that comes with Spring to use the latest XML syntax available in the upcoming 2.0M1.

Well, unfortunately I have to leave early, but the last week has been really interested for me as well as for many other people I’ve spoken to here in Miami at the Spring Experience.

It’s been a long week. I didn’t have time enough to prepare for my presentations really, but fortunately enough, they al went pretty well.

We announced Spring 2.0, which is going to be packed with new features, such as XML simplification, which Rob, Erik and I have been working on. The Spring XML format will more intuitive to use because of the namespace support we’ve added.

There are also plenty of new features to announce with respect to the AOP space. For example, from now on, you can use the AspectJ pointcut expression language to express where your Spring AOP aspects should be applied. This is really going to increase the usability as well as the conciseness of Spring AOP as well as other parts of Spring.

Apart from that there are many other features that will be introduced in Spring 2.0. One of my favorites in scoping. Until now, you only had the possibility to set a bean to be a prototype or a singleton. Using target source, you had the possibility to do all kinds of advanced stuff like thread local beans and so on. But all of this hasn’t been really usable until now. In the new Spring 2.0 version, you will be able to add a scope to any bean. This mean the bean will only be associated to that specific scope, such as Session scope, Request scope or ThreadLocal scope.

I actually didn’t attend that much sessions as I would like to have. I did attend Craig’s session about service oriented Spring, which was quite good. Also, I had a look at Bram Smeets’ session on DWR, which was excellent.

Okay, tomorrow I’m flying back to Europe after which I’ll be heading to Antwerp for Javapolis where I’ll be doing a university session together with Erwin Vervaet on Spring Web Flow and Spring MVC. Hope to see you there.