After spending 3 gorgeous days on the beach in Hollywood, FL (think Ft. Lauderdale), I have returned to a much cooler Charlotte than the one I left. No more record highs for us.

The Spring Experience 2007 was a great conference. As usual, some of the presenters demonstrated why nerds get a bad rep (can you spell b-o-r-i-n-g), others were excellent. In both cases, the content was great, its just the presentation style that lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. And that reminds me, where was the book store? Almost every single presenter has authored one or more tomes for our consumption, and yet here I sit on Monday morning with nary a one for my troubles. We did get a NFJS book as a consolation, but a book store in the lobby would have seriously helped my chiropractor’s Christmas budget. (As it was I had to unload 20 pounds of paper from my suitcase in order to not exceed the 50# per bag weight limit. Grrr.)

If Spring started its life as a Dependency Injection container, it has certainly come a long way. There are many new layers to this onion and it promises to keep growing. Rod Johnson, founder of Spring and now CEO of SpringSource (formerly Interface21), has brought many key players in the open source community together to create the formal infrastructure necessary to support Spring longer term.

I look forward to implementing the Spring Framework, Spring Security, Spring Web Services, Spring Web Flow, Spring Batch, Spring Integration, Spring Dynamic Modules, Spring, Spring, Spring, Spring, Spring, Spring Batch and Spring. 🙂