Spring Time! (Spring 1.2 rc1 released)

Spring 1.2 RC1 has been released. The changelog lists the following major features:

• finer-grained distribution jar files, alongside the full spring.jar
• AOP Alliance interfaces are now contained in spring-aop.jar and spring.jar
• XML bean definition improvements ("ref" and "value" shortcut attributes etc)
• improved AOP TargetSourceCreator mechanism (supporting
  LazyInitTargetSource too)
• transaction annotation support for JDK 1.5+ (annotation called "Transactional")
• improved WebLogicJtaTransactionManager (transaction names, isolation levels)
• SqlRowSet support for JDBC (in conjunction with JdbcTemplate's "queryForRowSet")
• Hibernate3 support (in orm.hibernate3; Hibernate 2.1 support is still available)
• JMX support for export of Spring beans as managed resources and for MBean access
• Commons Attributes and JDK 1.5+ annotations for JMX MBean export

They also anticipate Spring Web Flow becoming part of the nightly build and distribution later this week.

This release candidate is already considered stable and recommended for development use. We expect Spring 1.2 final to be released in late April.

If you're a Spring user, you should probably try this release out. If you're not, do you see any changes in this release to make you look into Spring?

Links:

• Spring Framework
• Download Spring 1.2 RC1
• Changelog