We are in the process of migrating to 3.0.5 of spring from 2.0.x. We mainly use spring in below scenarios

1. custom scope: thread local scope
2. persistence: jdbc+hibernate 3.6 (but moving to mix of ejb 3.0+jpa 2.0+hibernate, not sure if all 3 can co-exist in 1 app)
3. transactions: local (but planning to use jta due to the necessity of using multiple persistence inits, and has to use ejb+jpa+hibernate in 1 single trans), declarative trans mgmt
4. parent-child contexts
5. cxf
6. annotations+xml
7. OracleLobHandler
8. Resource/ResourceBundleMessageResource
9. JSF/Facelets with FacesSpringVariableResolver
10. ActiveMQ integration
11. Quartz integration
12. TaskExecutor
13. JMX exporter
14. HttpExporter/Invoker

Appreciate if someone can share their experiences like

1. what to watch out for
2. head aches/pain points
3. which ones to drop for better alternate choices in new 3.0.5 release
4. Is it better to switch from commons/iscreen validator to Hibernate Validator (Spec impl) or Spring Validator
5. Is there a bean mapping framework in spring that i can use instead of Dozer
6. XSLT transformation helper: currently we have small homegrown framework to cache xslts during load. if spring can do that for me then I would like to drop this
7. Encryption/Decryption support. Password generation support. Authentication with SALT
8. any SAML (or claims based secur
9. New ideas

Suggestions

1. Switch to latest version of aspectj
2. Upgrade guide from 2.5 to 3.0.5