[Building Sakai] What do we gain from a Spring upgrade?

[Ray Davis]

At today's project coordination meeting, Noah Botimer asked what was 
being gained by upgrading Sakai 2's / K1's Spring dependency from 2.0.6 
to 2.5.6. To expand on http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-16029 , 
and with my own biases firmly in place:

* Bug fixes, greater ability to hook up with other recent Spring-y 
pieces, etc.
* Annotation-based replacement of XML configurations.
* Java-code-based replacement of XML configurations.
* All OSGi, all the time.
* Finer-grained Spring libraries.
* Lots of Spring MVC improvements, which is one reason Grails needs it, 
which means...
* It lets Sakai developers use Grails.

Best,
Ray