Spring 2.0 M1 was released last week. As a maven related news, it will make life easier with transitive dependencies because the orm support was splitted in different jars spring-jdo, spring-hibernate2, spring-hibernate3, spring-toplink, spring-ojb.

Jars and poms are already available at ibiblio, so you can start using it right now in your maven 1 / maven 2 projects

Announcement by Juergen Hoeller:

Dear Spring community,

I am pleased to announce that Spring 2.0 M1 has just been released. 2.0 M1
is the first milestone of the next generation of Spring: introducing XML
schema based bean definitions, sophisticated AspectJ support, task executor
abstraction, asynchronous JMS facilities, portlet support, etc.

The main sample application in this release is JPetStore, which already
illustrates some basic usage of schema-based bean definitions and aspects
expressed using AspectJ pointcut language. 2.0 M2 will include further
sample usages and improved documentation of the new configuration style.

Spring 2.0 remains fully backwards-compatible with Spring 1.2. Both the DTD
style and the schema style are supported for XML bean definitions. No
incompatible API changes have been introduced (other than removing
deprecated methods). Furthermore, Spring 2.0 still runs on JDK 1.3+ and J2EE
1.2+.

Note that Spring has been repackaged: spring.jar contains the entire core
plus some small extensions; larger extensions such as support for specific
ORMs have been factored out into separate jar files (spring-hibernate2.jar,
spring-hibernate3.jar, spring-toplink.jar, etc). See the readme for details.

Cheers – and Merry Christmas to everybody celebrating Christmas 🙂

Juergen