We have implemented some incremental improvements to Spring. They include:
  • Module support: you can split framework code and applications in code modules (each with code, config and transitive dependencies)
  • Simplified remoting:
    o remote POJOs as EJB session beans
    o add implicit context passing to cleanly add technical context with remote method invocations (e.g. to add a security principal or the sub-company on whose behalf a request is being made)
  • A light daemon manager service
  • A light exception handling framework that implements a safety facade

Module support makes the many emerging Spring extensions more easily usable: the packaging is unified and the default usage of new features is much easier.
For example, to use our JMX module (it publishes all available Spring Beans and their config in an Application Context under JMX), one simply adds a <dependency module="module-jmx"/> to the module description of the application: all default configuration and classpath settings can then be used automatically.

For now, EL4J is under the GPL but we are looking forward to contributing significant parts of it to Spring.

More info
* Introductory article: http://el4j.sourceforge.net/el4j/EL4...onArticle1.pdf
* More documentation: http://el4j.sourceforge.net/documentation.htm

What do you think?