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.