Spring 2 seminar by Rod Johnson, London

On march 2nd 2006 I was in London to hear Rod Johnson speak about new features in Spring 2. Rod explained that the focus for Spring 2 was 'make complex things simple and simple things even simpler'. From what we heard I think they succeeded pretty good.
I was especially impressed by the integration of AspectJ and the declarative way that you now can use to define aspects. It is now possible to use a simple POJO as an aspect. No more implementing or extending advisors. They defined a couple of new namespaces in the xml schema, like the aop namespace.
You can do something like

< aop:aspect >
... use valid AspectJ expression to define pointcuts and joinpoints ...
... use an ordinary class as an aspect
< /aop:aspect >

and there is your aspect.
Also nice is the struts like tag support they now have build in. Binding of forms to commands is probably a lot easier and more intuitive than before.
Of course he could only tell us a little bit in 2,5 hours, but the things that he told made me sure that a migration from Spring 1.2.6 to Spring 2 is a good decision.
You can find Spring 2 at http://www.springframework.org/download