I'm somewhat surprised that there hasn't been more noise around in the blogosphere about Spring 2.1 's TestContext Framework . I had the pleasure of working with Juergen Hoeller for a day after JavaZone. Among other things, I learned about the fancy @Autowired annotation that you can use to make your autowiring much safer. Normally autowiring is considered bad practice, but it was Juergen's advice that now it is okay to use. This means in practice that all your service beans will still be declared in an applicationContext.xml file, but the dependencies and object graphs will be annotated in the Java files (or atleast where you see fit). After this I had a deeper look into the features of Spring 2.1. Note the point about "our next-generation Spring TestContext Framework with support for JUnit4". Now this is cool. Why we need it (or something like it) For a long while I (and many of my colleagues and peers) have been annoyed by the disability to manage tests a...
My thoughts on software development.