Spring Framework 3.0 RC2 released

Originally expected to arrive in mid-October, Spring Framework Co-founder Juergen Hoeller has announced the availability of the second release candidate (RC2) for version 3.0 of the open source Spring framework for Java applications. The second release candidate includes a number of "key improvements" over the previous RC1 release and focuses on compatibility improvements and runtime optimisations.

The latest release is now fully compliant with the JSR-330 specification for Dependency Injection in Java and includes a new mvc configuration namespace. The RC2 also features revised lifecycle management at runtime, a dedicated AnnotationConfigApplicationContext to make programmatic bootstrapping "as convenient as possible" and revised URI encoding to ensure the proper treatment of special characters in any part of the request URL.

More details about the release can be found in the release announcement and Spring 3.0 RC2 is available to download. As version 3.0 of the Spring Framework is fully Java 5 based, even though Spring 2.5 currently supports several of the higher-level features of Java 5, Java 5 or above is now required. Spring is licensed under the Apahce License 2.0. A final release date for version 3.0 of the Spring Framework, however, has yet to be confirmed but Hoeller says that a GA is "just around the corner".

See also:

• Spring 3 is in the air - a first look, a feature from The H.

(crve)