The Spring Experience - Day 4

Day 4 started much like Day 3 with another good presentation from Ben Alex regarding Spring Security. This session focused on the enhancements provided in Spring Security 2:

• Annotation driven security that allows a developer to specify required roles directly above a method declaration


• User management API for creating users and default implementations for JDBC and LDAP backed stores


• Hierarchical roles. UPDATE_ALL implicitly grants you UPDATE_CUSTOMER, UPDATE_ORDER, etc...


• Many other features like NTLM support, Portlet Security integration, and Automatic login page generaton

The second session I hit was RESTful web services in Spring by Arjen Poutsma. This session was a combination introduction to REST (Representational State Transfer) and highlight of facilities coming soon for developing clients and providers of these web services. It was great to see how similar the EndPoints Arjen displayed were to the Controller classes shown by Keith Donald earlier in the week in the RESTful web sites talk. Despite the number of disparate people working on these separate Spring based sub-projects, they are all adhering to a few common designs that make it very easy for a Spring developer to become productive in each of the environments.

OSGi was next up, presented by Adrian Colyer and Costin Leau. OSGi will provide Java application developers with a facility for deploying and managing separate versions of the same subsystems or libraries. The examples shown were somewhat contrived, but the concepts of OSGi are extremely powerful and immediately useful in at least two of the last three Java clients I've worked at. If you've ever found yourself trying to juggle version collision of components in your application, be sure to investigate OSGi.

Final talk of the conference for me was Spring Batch Internals by David Syer and Lucas Ward. They covered a plethora of the common issues facing batch processing systems and the solutions provided to these issues by Spring Batch. Batch processing seems to be the red headed step child of software development. Continually neglected while SOA and AJAX based applications win all of the adoration of the parents. Regardless, it is still a significant portion of the software projects out there and there are a wealth of common patterns that can be pulled up a level into a framework like Spring Batch. I'd go into more detail on it but I am seriously exhausted and my head hurts from the amount of information presented at this conference.

In a nutshell, the content at this conference was great and the majority of the speakers were very good. Only downside was that I didn't win an iPhone.