~ Overview of Spring 3.1 ~

If you use Spring Framework for your daily technology needs, then you should be watching the talk by Chris Beams - Modern enterprise application configuration with Spring. Following is the summary of the talk if you cannot watch for 50 mins.

Spring has evolved a lot over time from 1.0 to 3.1

Spring 3.x != Spring Framework

Spring 3.1 == { Framework, Security, Integration, Batch, Data, Social, Roo, WebFlow, AQMP, REST, MVC, ... }

Spring 3.1

Some of the major feature additions to Spring 3.1

1. Code based configurations. Yes, configurations can now be completely done {100%} via Annotations. 
2. One can even configure Java Web Application without web.xml if you are following Servlet 3.0 spec + Java 7.0 + Tomcat 7.* || Jetty 8.x {Container which supports Servlet 3.0}
3. An ORM framework like Hibernate can now be configured without XML w/ Hibernate 4+
4. XML is over. Don't worry Spring is STILL gonna support it
5. You can now *Enable* a specific Spring Component or Custom Component w/ Annotation called @Configuration
6. Any developer would have come across many times to load  properties from property file, database table, Tomcat Server, JVM Args, etc. Spring now introduces *Environment & PropertySources* Environment.getProperty("") gets us the data; can re-order, add, etc ;)
7. Bean definition Profiles is another good addition. I would love to use this for handling configuration of different deployments - Dev, UAT, Stage, Production. Have been waiting for this feature!!!
8. They even support Testing support for @Configuration
9. Scala finds its way into Spring now. Time to learn Scala at some point of 2013
10. Builds of Spring Framework has been moved to Gradle. Maven was good enough. Gotta read up on Gradle too.

References: Chris Beams {Twitter} | Different Styles of DI {Git}| Spring Framework {Git}