The first in a series of articles exploring what's new in Spring 2.5: annotation support for dependency injection, auto-detection of Spring components on the classpath and lifecycle methods.

Spring is perhaps the best of the component-based frameworks that emerged at the turn of the 21st century. It vastly improves the way that developers write and deliver infrastructure code in Java ...

The latest Spring really embraces annotations, however. "In Spring 2.5, we've extended annotation support to provide comprehensive support for dependency injection," Johnson said. Dependency injection ...