The Spring Experience 2005 kicked off tonight with a big bang.

In the post dinner keynote, Rod Johnson talked about Spring past, present and future. Spring 2.0 M1, with a number of compelling new features, was announced to be available in about 2-4 days.

Highlights of the keynote included:

•  An overview by Rod of the much more powerful AOP capabilities in Spring 2.0, including full support for AspectJ pointcut expressions for applying pointcuts. This is mostly the combined effort of Adrian Colyer (the AspectJ lead) and Rod Johnson. Other AOP enhancements include support for the @Aspect annotation for creating aspects out of plain Java classes, and the ability to use AspectJ to dependency inject any objects.
  
• A demonsration by Rob Harrop of the XML configuration enhancements he has implemented for Spring 2.0, effectively allowing custom domain specific dialects (described by XML Schema) to be created for XML configuration. Spring will ship out of the box with a number of variants for AOP and transaction config, among others.
• Alef Arendsen demonstrated that Spring 2.0 will be completely backwards compatible. He showed the Spring JPetstore sample (from the Spring 1.2.6 distribution) running in Geronimo. He then proceeded to overwrite the 1.2.6 spring.jar file with another version containing the code for Spring 2.0 M1, and showed that the app ran completely unchanged on redeployment, with no breakage. He then modified the XML configuration to use the new simplified XML config, and showed that again the application ran without breakage.
• Keith Donald demonstrated Spring WebFlow as used to implement a flight booking system in incremental fashion.
• Other new features mentioned included message driven POJOs, scoped bean support in the application context, CommonJ support, and the SimpleJdbcTemplate for simplified JdbcTemplate usage in a Java 5 environment.