Spring Web Flow 2 Release Update

[Keith Donald]

Dear Spring Community,

I wanted to take this opportunity to update you on the Web Flow 2 release. As you have seen from the discussion here and updates on the springframework.org download and documentation page, the Spring Web Flow 2.0.0 release is available. As you probably also have noticed, the .jar files in the release are named differently than in previous releases. I first would like to provide some background on the new artifact naming scheme:

Web Flow 2.0.0 adopts newly established artifact naming conventions for Spring projects that can run in a OSGi environment, and is the first Spring project to apply these conventions. These conventions are based on the standard OSGi bundle versioning format, which is:

<bundle-symbolic-name>.<major>.<minor>.<micro>[.qualifier].

Applying these conventions to the 2.0.0 artifacts gives us:

org.springframework.webflow-2.0.0.RELEASE.jar
org.springframework.binding-2.0.0.RELEASE.jar
org.springframework.js-2.0.0.RELEASE.jar
org.springframework.faces-2.0.0.RELEASE.jar

You can read more about this format here. These jars are just plain jars that add Manifest information for OSGi compliance and are named based on Spring's recently established conventions for OSGi compatible libraries.

I realize it may look a little odd that Web Flow is currently the only Spring portfolio project adhering to these conventions. We made the decision to go ahead and make Web Flow OSGi compatible for the major 2.0.0 release, rather than have to do it later in a future minor 2.0 revision. The next Spring project that will adopt these conventions will be Spring Framework itself, starting with version 3.0.0.M1.

You probably also have noticed there has not yet been a general Web Flow 2 release announcement, outside of the good discussions here. This is for several reasons:
- We wanted to consider release feedback from the community on this forum first, especially given the change in release artifact ids.
- We wanted to make sure Web Flow 2 does indeed run in a OSGi environment, and on the recently announced SpringSource Application Platform -- so we can say this confidently when we do generally announce.
- We want to make sure Web Flow 2 gets the attention it deserves by announcing during a time where there is little else going on (JavaOne is going on this week, the application platform was announced last week).

So here we are now. I'd like to provide some insight on what you can expect coming up. First, if you are already using 2.0.0 like I know many of you are, keep using it-- the release is stable, tested, and ready. The feedback we have received so far here has been great--we have had five bug reports since the release and most of those have already been addressed. You can review the bug fixes in the 2.0.1 changelog; if one is effecting your app, feel free to upgrade to a 2.0.1 nightly build.

Next week on Thursday May 15th, with nothing else going on in Spring land, we will finally announce general availability of Web Flow 2 from springframework.org. At the same time, we will quietly release Spring Web Flow 2.0.1 to make the latest bug fixes available and fill a few gaps identified in 2.0.0. We will also announce confidently that Web Flow 2 runs on all major Java EE platforms, as well as the newly announced SpringSource Application Platform as an OSGi-compatible enterprise library!

This is an exciting time for our community, and Web Flow 2 really is a great leap forward for web application development. I sincerely appreciate your patience and feedback during this time as we get the final aspects of the release polished, and the messaging right for the big release announcement.

Sincerely,

Keith