Spring 3.0 RC1 is out!
I’d initially thought Spring 3.0 was a bit of a “yawn”. The previous posts on it left me underwhelmed (and… to be honest my interest in new technologies has been elsewhere.
However, Juergen’s latest post has me a bit intrigued.
Yeah there’s support for JEE6, Portlet 2.0, full Java 5 support and their “Spring expression language”. Blah…blah… Still awake? Yeah… me neither.
But, its significant additions to the annotations for “declarative model validation” and advanced binding for Spring MVC (again through annotations) that are really interesting to me.
The guys at Spring can do a better job of explaining than I can so see here and here.
This looks really interesting and provided there are a bunch of standard validation and formatting annotations included with Spring 3.0, it would be immediately useful on my projects. A clear and consistent place to put validations and formatting details where they make the most sense.
I know some people might think that placing that information (especially the formatters) into your model is a violation of separations of concern. But, I don’t see it that way. The formatting is still handled by a separate class (the annotation) and in any app there would have to be some mapping between the model and how its formatted for the screen. I see these annotations as an elegant solution (if Java can be elegant 
).
Have you looked at Spring 3.0 yet? If so, what are your thoughts?
