Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past few years or are completely detached from the Java community, you have no doubt heard of Spring. Nothing has changed the face of Java development as much as Spring. What started out as a challenge to complex and burdensome enterprise Java standards has now deposed those standard and has heavily influenced newer specifications. Spring is, in fact, considered by many to be a de facto standard for enterprise Java development.

But Spring didn't stop with simplifying enterprise Java development. As Spring has evolved, there have been simplifications to Spring itself. With each new version, Spring not only offers greater development power, but has also found ways to simplify its own programming model. What used to take pages and pages of XML-based configuration has now been replaced with more succinct XML, common conventions, and even annotation-based options.

If you're new to Spring and want to see how to use it in your applications or if you're a Spring veteran who is looking to leverage the new features and ease of the latest versions of Spring, then let me encourage you to attend Java Development with Spring, a course that I'll be teaching in Dallas next week. In this 3-day course, we'll go through all of the essentials of working with Spring and you'll get a chance to try it out in hands-on lab activities.

This course will be held at the Improving Enterprises office in Dallas, TX (map) on April 13-15. I really hope to see you there.

For those of you who can't make it, you can catch me at several stops of the No-Fluff/Just-Stuff tour this year. I'm currently slated to speak in:

• Bloomington, IL : April 10
• Reston, VA: May 1-2
• St. Louis, MO: May 22
• Dallas, TX: June 4-6
• Columbus, OH: June 26-27
• Salt Lake City, UT: July 9

And I'll also be at Dallas TechFest on July 30.

See ya soon!

The response to my earlier announcement regarding the Action Framework has been overwhelming. In a surprise move, the Apache Software Foundation has railroaded Action through what will go on record as being the fastest incubation period in ASF history--Action is now a top-level Apache project.

Shortly thereafter, Apache agreed to sell out to Oracle for $1.5B. As the newest member of the Apache family, my cut of the proceeds is just under $5 million ($1 million of it to be paid in rolled pennies, $2 million in the cash equivalent of 1985 Topps Bo Jackson rookie football cards, and the remainder to be paid out by a Saudi prince through an elaborate balance transfer directly into my savings account.)

In celebration of this momentous occasion, I've worked with Manning to offer a 50% discount on all Spring-related Manning books. Use the code "april1" on Manning's site (today only) to get 50% off on the following titles:

• Spring in Action, 2nd Edition
• Spring Integration in Action
• Spring Dynamic Modules in Action
• SpringSource DM Server in Action
• OSGi in Action
• OSGi Application Frameworks
• AspectJ in Action

In case you haven't figured it out by now, the first two paragraphs of this blog post, as well as the blog post from earlier today, are just part of the April Fool's Day fun. The part about the Manning discount, however, is not a joke...go take advantage of the 50% discount at Manning.com now.

Today I'm delighted to announce that I've started development on Action, a new open-source web framework. As its name implies, Action builds upon the action-based model espoused by several web frameworks, most notably Struts and WebWork.

What? Another web framework? Why do we need another one, much less one that is based on Struts? Action differentiates itself from those other frameworks is that it is designed from the ground up to exploit modern web development practices, including Ajax, HTML 5, and semantic web technologies.

Development of Action has been underway for several months and I am nearing the point of a 4.1-Milestone release. (The decision to version the first release as 4.1 will become apparent later.)

Much as with all new frameworks, there will be a slight learning curve to become proficient in Action. To help smooth out that curve, I've already been working with Manning to publish a definitive guide to Action entitled Action in Action. The first MEAP chapters of that book will become available in concert with the 4.1 GA release of the framework.

As it turns out, the design of Action makes it quite portable to .NET. Consequently, I have also been working in parallel on the .NET version of Action, known as NAction. A corresponding edition of NAction in Action will also be available from Manning upon the release of the NAction framework.

On a technical note, the Ajax portion of the Action framework will leverage a RESTful API driven by JSON resources. I'm particularly proud of a custom extension of the Jackson JSON Processor that will power the REST/JSON features of Action. More details of this component and how to develop with it will be featured in the upcoming Action Jackson in Action, also to be published by Manning.

It should also be noted that due to some clever optimizations in memory and processor utilization, Action can run with ease on constrained devices such as the iPad, Blackberry Storm, or Commodore 64.

In case you've not heard or don't follow me on Twitter, I'm pleased to announce that my fourth DZone Refcard, one covering Spring Web Flow, was released today. You can also read a short interview that I did with James Sugrue.

In case you're wondering...yep, I'm still working on Spring in Action 3. In fact, I'm now writing the Spring Web Flow chapter...so I get a chance to expand on what's in the Refcard. It's a lot of fun writing Refcards, but it's incredibly difficult to cram so much good material into less than 6 pages. In fact, despite my best efforts to keep it brief, over 2 pages of material landed on the cutting floor before the final product made it online. I assure you that there all of that good stuff, and more, will make it into the SiA3 Web Flow chapter.

I hope you like the Spring Web Flow Refcard. I hope to get a chance to do some more later this year once I've finished working on SiA3.

Now that we're a few weeks into 2010, my speaking calendar is starting to take shape. Already in just the first quarter I think I have more dates set than I did in all of 2009.

If you follow this blog, you know me and you know that I like to yammer on about Spring and OSGi. So it should be no surprise that it is those topics that I'll be talking most about again this year. But I'll be throwing in some other stuff as well.

In case you're interested in attending one of the places I'll be speaking, here's a list of the places I've got on my calendar right now:

Feb 10th: JavaMUG - Dallas, TX

I'll be talking about Spring MVC and the new REST features in Spring 3.

Feb 23rd: SOA User Group - Dallas, TX

Here I'll be talking about OSGi and how it provides an "SOA in a JVM".

Feb 27-28: Greater Wisconsin Software Symposium (NFJS) - Milwaukee, WI

Jay Zimmerman has me scheduled to talk about what's new in Spring 3, OSGi, Spring Roo, and testing beyond JUnit.

Mar 14th: Twin Cities Software Symposium (NFJS) - Minneapolis, MN

As in Wisconsin, I'll be talking about Spring 3, OSGi, Spring Roo, and the Spring Expression Language (SpEL).

Mar 17th: Spring Dallas User Group - Dallas, TX

We haven't ironed out a specific topic for this event, but I'm sure it will be something about Spring. Any requests?

One way you can keep up with where I'll be speaking is to subscribe to my speaking engagements feed (served via FeedBurner). I will do my best to keep that feed updated.

In addition to all of these fun events, I'm also scheduled to teach a Spring course for my company, Improving Enterprises. The dates are April 6-8 and it will be at the Improving Enterprises offices in Dallas, TX. Do me a favor and tell your friends and tweet about this...it's the first time I've taught a class through Improving and I'd like to see a good turn out.

Put these events on your calendar. I hope to see you at one of them.