Keynote
The first day of SpringOne in the MetroPolis business/conference center in Antwerp started with the keynote. Looks like this is a rule, as every major conference have one at the very beginning. SpringOne wasn’t different, as Rod Johnson, the “father” of Spring, give a 2 hours presentation about Spring/Interface21 status. First of all, Interface21 (the company behind Spring) is moving to Silicon Valley, California. This is thus to a larger plan (see AmericanVentureMagazine for example) to make Interface21 a billion dollar company – one of the leaders of the market. Personally, I’m skeptical about this move as I prefer the way 37Signals do their business. Sticking with the private equity companies as dealing with shareholders (respecting their needs instead of your own) makes things harder. But if Interface21 wants to be a billion dollar company, then OK. If that $10M dollars would make Spring better, then I’m fine with that!
OK. That’s all about business. Let’s move to the IT stuff 
)) So far nothing revolutionary was announced: Spring 2.1 with support for Java 6 is coming at the end of July, Spring 2.0 IDE plugin for Eclipse this month’s end. Spring Batch (co-developed with Accenture) was also mentioned as a part of the growing Spring Portfolio.
Hands-on sessions
From the first day sessions I concentrated on the “Hands-on” ones (I hate theoretical junk): “Spring AOP and JMX” by Ben Hale, “Monitoring your Spring Beans using JMX” by Rob Harrop, and “Best Practices using Spring Web Flow”. The ones about JMX were really great – some of the examples were really surprising as I had never supposed to use JMX in such a way (temporarily blocking the application flow). For sure there is a great power behind JMX and AOP, and all of this Spring makes a lot easier.
Finally, I’m not yet very profficient with Spring Web Flow, but the new part of my project at Sabre (VacationStudio) is going to use SFW, so there will be a chance to become closer friends!
