Had a great time at SpringOne 2GX today. Basically it was registration, mingling and the keynote, but it was good.
Rod Johnson opened up talking about the community and giving some commentary on what’s new in Spring 3.0. Some of the highlights included:
Rod talked about the @Configuration annotation in Spring 3.0 that I think is awesome. Basically we can use annotations to specify a configuration class that can also use normal injection to load its dependencies and properties. Should make for much more flexible Spring config and less XML Hell.
Rod introduced Spring Integration and Blaze DS (Spring/Flex integration) and had a few SpringSource guys do a demo. It went over pretty well.
Graeme Rocher took the stage to talk about Grails. This was my favorite part. Graeme did a demo of the Grails support in the upcoming (Wednesday) STS release which showed some awesome Grails integration. I will definitely find out about debugger support while I’m here as that is my big Grails hangup right now. He also mentioned Intellij Community Edition, which I had no ‘idea’ about. I will definitely be checking into it. He also talked about the Grails community… high points being that there are over 300 plugins. He joked with an Apple-like “…there’s a plugin for that”.
Rod made an announcement about SpringSource TC Server Developer Edition which is 100% Tomcat, is Spring aware, and offers the Spring insight dashboard.
We were then treated to some STS integration with tools that have evolved from the Hyperic acquisition. They offer awesome looking performance evaluation capabilities. They are hoping to be available by year end.
Finally Rod talked about the VMWare acquisition. Obviously he thinks and hopes it leads to greater things for Spring, Groovy, and Grails in the future, in particular to cloud computing.
All in all, I am really excited to attend the sessions I have chosen so far and am looking forward to being immersed in the Spring and 2GX universe for the next 3 days.
mikewitters.com 
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