Author Archive: Marion

Spring Framework 4.1: General Availability Release

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Spring was able to stay on schedule, seven months after they publicized their plan, Spring Framework 4.1 General Availability (GA) has been released and is now accessible. The GA announcement has been made by Juergen Hoeller, co-founder of Spring Framework, in Spring’s blog site last September 4.

Spring Framework 4.1, started its development in January 2014 and had its first release candidate in July followed up by a second release candidate last August 15 which includes fixes and improvements. According to Hoeller, the following are the new features being offered in 4.1:

He also mentioned a bunch of other improvements made for this release such as:

  • Direct field binding support with auto-growing for nested fields
  • Java 8’s Optional for injection points and MVC handler parameters
  • Support for the standard @Priority annotation for dependency ordering and selection
  • Annotated @Lookup methods with support for provided constructor arguments
  • Declarative SQL scripts and programmatic transactions in the TestContext framework
  • Enhanced Hibernate JPA setup: isolation levels, discovery of managed packages

Additional information on the new features and enhancements can be found here.

Other features that weren’t able to make on this GA release will be included in the 4.2 line which is scheduled on the second quarter of 2015.

Minimum requirements for 4.1 didn’t change, you still need JDK 6+, Servlet 2.5+ and JPA 2.0+ same with Spring Framework 4.0. The 4.1.x line is now the “primary maintenance branch”, therefore, early upgrade to 4.1 is recommended. Since 4.1 line supersedes 4.0.x line, the 4.0.7 has been released together with 4.1’s GA to assist everyone in upgrading.

On the other hand, build snapshot for Spring Framework 4.1.1 is now available, you can start reviewing its API and Reference documentations.

Modular Source Code for JDK 9

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Modular Source Code also known as JEP 201, authored by Mark Reinhold and owned by Alan Bateman was created on July 22, 2014. JEP 201, second among the JEPs lined up for JDK 9, will “restructure the JDK’s source code from a scheme used since 1997 into modules, improve the build system to compile modules, and implement module boundaries at build time”. However, JRE and JDK binary images will stay as they are and no module system will be introduced.

JEP 201 is described as a part of the first phase of JDK 9’s main feature – Project Jigsaw. One main goal of the Project Jigsaw is to “make implementations of the Java SE Platform easily scalable down to small devices”. In connection with Project Jigsaw’s development, it was mentioned by Reinhold in one of his previous blog posts that merging is advisable to be performed before Jigsaw nears its completion.

In a short message posted by Reinhold last August 18, 2014, entitled “JDK 9’s source code is now modular”, he announced that JEP 201 changesets have been merged into the JDK. The changes are now included in the latest Early Access Release for JDK 9 – 9 Build b29 which is now available for download.

Restructuring the source code at an early stage is driven by the following factors:

  1. JDK developers will have a chance to familiarize themselves with the “modular structure of the system”;
  2. Implementation of “module boundaries in the build” to maintain that structure moving forward;
  3. “Shuffling” of non-modular source code to modular will be prevented during the improvements on Project Jigsaw.

Sample codes and details of the proposed new scheme versus the current scheme have been presented at the JEP 201 site. Below is an excerpt from the site that shows an illustration and explanation of the new scheme they wanted to implement “in every repository in the JDK forest except for hotspot”.

In abbreviated form:

src/$MODULE/{share,$OS}/classes/$PACKAGE/*.java

                                                 native/include/*.{h,hpp}

                                                      $LIBRARY/*.{c,cpp}

                                                 conf/*

where:

$MODULE is a module name (e.g., java.base);

The share directory contains shared, cross-platform code, as before;

The $OS directory contains operating-system-specific code, as before, where $OS is one of unix, windows, etc.;

The classes directory contains Java source files and resource files organized into a directory tree reflecting their API $PACKAGE hierarchy, as before;

The native directory contains C or C++ source files, as before but organized differently:

  • The includedirectory contains C or C++ header files intended to be exported for external use (e.g., jni.h);
  • C or C++ source files are placed in a $LIBRARY directory, whose name is that of the shared library or DLL into which the compiled code will be linked (e.g., libjava or libawt); and, finally,

The conf directory contains configuration files meant to be edited by end users (e.g., net.properties).