The first Release Candidate of Spring 2.0 has been announced and released.
Enhancements and new features added in 2.0 include simplified bean configuration, enhanced AOP support, support for Hibernate 3.1 and 3.2 plus Java Persistence API support, message driven POJOs and conventions based MVC.
I am especially excited about the last part since I have been doing a lot of development with Grails recently and can really see the benefits of the coding by convention and avoiding all the configuration necessary in so many other frameworks and J2EE approaches. I’ll be taking some time to look into this as I believe this is a huge step in right direction for Java development – anything to save developers from spending so much time in configuration files and back to writing productive code!