Spring Framework 2.1 is turning into Spring Framework 2.5!

After so many Milestone releases of Spring 2.1, Spring Team is going to announce the new version of Spring as Spring Framework 2.5 ! The official announcement of the Final release will be in this October. But according to the Team’s official blog the first release candidate expected for late September itself. The new version contains a bunch of great features…

• full Java 6 and Java EE 5 support (JDBC 4.0, JTA 1.1, JavaMail 1.4, JAX-WS 2.0, etc)
• full-featured annotation-driven dependency injection (including support for ‘qualifier’ annotations)
• support for component scanning in the classpath (autodetecting annotated classes)
• “beanName” pointcut element in AspectJ pointcut expressions
• built-in support for for AspectJ load-time weaving (based on Spring’s LoadTimeWeaver abstraction)
• further XML configuration namespaces (“context”, “jms”) for maximum convenience
• extended SimpleJdbcTemplate functionality (support for named parameters etc)
• officially certified WebSphere support (support for the WebSphere 6 UOWManager facility etc)
• Spring ApplicationContext can be deployed as RAR file (for headless application modules)
• JCA 1.5 message endpoint management (for Spring-managed JMS and CCI message listeners)
• completely revised framework for integration tests (with support for JUnit 4 and TestNG)

The Spring era continues… 🙂 For more reference you can follow the official blog of Spring team.