Time for the annual trek to Drexel in Philadelphia for Chariot Solutions’ “Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise” conference. I will be presenting a hands-on introduction on how to simplify your JDBC programming.

There is plenty of other Spring content as well. Here is a list of the Spring related presentations:

• “What’s New in Spring 2.5?” with Rossen Stoyanchev
• “An Introduction to Spring Integration” with Mark Fisher
• “Simple JDBC with Spring 2.5″ with Thomas Risberg
• “AOP in the Enterprise” with Ramnivas Laddad

Spring 2.1 M1 has been released. This is the first milestone release in the Spring 2.1 series, introducing major new features including annotation-based configuration, JCA-based message endpoint management, new “context” and “jms” XML configuration namespaces, and JDK 1.6 and Java EE 5 support.

Download| Documentation | Changelog

I’m pleased to announce a two-day training course in basic Spring web application development to be held on March 13-14th, 2007. I’m writing and will be teching this course together with Joel Confino of Chariot Solutions. Joel is a Java EE architect and Spring enthusiast with lots of experience developing Java applications.

This training course is written FOR DEVELOPERS, BY DEVELOPERS. It is hands-on and interactive. You will be writing code!

Spring Kickstart is a two-day training course covering:

• The Spring Lightweight Container including the Bean Factory and Application Context
• Data access with JPA and the JDBC Template
• Transactions, AOP, and JMX: Adding powerful services to your POJOs
• Spring MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework for creating Web applications
• Third-party web framework integration using Struts and JSF
• Learn the many new features in the Spring Framework version 2.0

The format is approximately 50% lecture and 50% lab work. With 2 instructors, you’ll benefit from a low instructor-to-student ratio and be able to get your questions answered one-on-one.

Register at: http://www.chariotsolutions.com/spring

The course will be held in the magnificent Hub CityView meeting space conveniently located in Center City Philadelphia only 1.5 blocks from Suburban Station. Breakfast, lunch and refreshments are included on both days.

Arrived in Florida to attend the 2006 version of The Spring Experience. Hotel is great and I’m looking forward to the beach party. Jay Zimmerman promised to provide beach towels and here he is together with Keith Donald proudly displaying the final product.

With the 1 million downloads as reported by Rod yesterday and with Spring Forward 2006 “selling out” with two weeks to go, I have to conclude that there is a great deal of interest in Spring currently. If you are among the lucky ones to sign up early, then you can look forward to an exciting day on Tuesday 9/26. We have a great line-up of speakers, and who knows, maybe Spring 2.0 will be out by then …

The Philadelphia Spring Users Group has been growing steadily. We now have close to 200 members on our mailing list and about 40-60 attendees for our meetings held every 2-3 months.

It is now time to kick it up a notch. We are, together with Chariot Solutions, arranging a FREE one-day Spring conference on September 26. The conference will be held at the Penn State Great Valley campus in Malvern, Pennsylvania which is just outside of Philadelphia.

Chariot Solutions have been organizing free conferences for a couple of years now, and this is a great way for the local Java community to be able to see industry leaders present on mostly open source related topics.

This time we will have over 15 speakers present on a range of topics including New Features in Spring 2.0, Aspect Oriented Programming, Spring Web Flow, Ajax & DWR and new support for Java Persistence API.

We have invited both members of the core Spring team, well known book authors and a number of local Spring experts to come and present on topics that they are interested in.

Speakers at this conference include
- Ramnivas Laddad, author of ‘AspectJ in Action’
- Keith Donald, Lead for Spring Web Flow
- Matt Raible, author of ‘Spring Live’
- Dain Sundstrom, Chief Architect for IBM Gluecode and Geronimo Committer
- Mike Keith, Co-spec Lead for JSR-220 EJB3

Did I mention that it’s FREE?

More information is available at http://springforward2006.com

It’s time for another trip down to Florida in December. Last years “Spring Experience” provided a great conference experience. It was all concentrated in a comfortable hotel over three action packed days. This year the event is held in Hollywood, FL and Jay Zimmerman from No Fluff Just Stuff has promised that we will get to spend time on the beach this year. He is even providing the beach towels. Should be a really fun event.

Time to start working on the presentation for SpringOne. There is quite a bit of O/R Mapping coverage, especially EJB3 persistence. Both Patrick Linskey and Mike Keith will present on this topic. So i decided to cover some JDBC techniques that can come in handy for tasks that are not suited for the O/R Mapping technologies. The title is “Spring JDBC — when ORM is not the best choice”. Should be interesting.

Saw that Craig’s Spring in Action is available in Chinese and Portugese. Looks like our book is available in Chinese as well.

I presented “New Persistence Features for Spring 2.0″ at the Philadelphia Emerging Technology Conference
sponsored by Chariot Solutions. You can download the slides.