Spring 2.5 enhances Spring 2.0 with many exciting new features, including:
- Full Java 6 and Java EE 5 support (JDBC 4.0, JTA 1.1, JavaMail 1.4, JAX-WS 2.0)
- Full-featured annotation-driven dependency injection, including support for 'qualifiers'
- Support for auto-detecting application components in the classpath and auto-configuring them as Spring managed objects
- A new bean name pointcut element in AspectJ pointcut expressions
- Built-in support for AspectJ load-time weaving based on the LoadTimeWeaver abstraction
- New XML configuration namespaces "context" and "jms", for maximum convenience
- A completely revised integration test framework, with first-class support for JUnit 4 and TestNG
- A new annotation-based controller model for Spring MVC supporting Servlet and Portlet environments
- Extended SimpleJdbcTemplate functionality, including support for named SQL parameters
- Officially certified WebSphere support
- The packaging of Spring Framework jars as OSGi-compliant bundles out of the box
- The ability to deploy a Spring ApplicationContext as a JCA RAR file, for headless application modules
- JCA 1.5 message endpoint management, for Spring-managed JMS and CCI message listeners.