Spring Framework

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring! There's a lot to cover, so let's dive into it! Always eager to help ring in the new year properly, Mark Fisher announced the Spring Integration 2.1 GA yesterday. The ... [More] new release has everything, and then some! It features new or revised support for a broad spectrum of technologies including AMQP, JDBC, GemFire, MongoDB, Redis, and much, much more. Andy Clement and Martin Lippert's update on the latest and greatest on the SpringSource Tool Suite tooling from SpringOne2GX is up and available. Check it out! Speaking of Spring Integration, fans of the art of integration should check out John Davies' excellent talk on how his company is employing Spring Integration to build massively scalable applications. Take it from me - a hardened enterprise integration wonk - John Davies has been around in this industry for a looong time, and he knows what he's talking about. The fine folks at BSB labs have been playing with Spring 3.1 profile activation. The blog entry comes complete with sample code on GitHub! Blogger Matt Raible has an interesting blog illustrating the steps he took to get his ready-to-roll template application AppFuse, updated to the latest and greatest Spring 3.1 and Spring Security 3.1. Check it out! The Java Developer Journal has an interesting piece on how to defer the runtime cost of logging by using Spring's support for asynchronous execution. Open source Java and, in particular, Tomcat, rule the day. Now, more than ever, people are rejecting heavy, monolithic application servers in favor of lightweight, singly focused applications that can be partitioned horizontally on both the front end and the backend. More often than not, they are choosing Tomcat to meet this requirement. For more spiffy pie charts, check out NewRelic blog, The Death of WebSphere and WebLogic App Servers? New Infographic shows the Rise of OSS Java. James Ward's SpringOne talk on running Spring and Grails applications on Heroku from SpringOne2GX is now up on InfoQ. Heroku is of course one more cloud on which Spring applications run portably. Spring Security has moved to Github! Spring Security project lead Luke Taylor sent out the change-of-address Tweet this afternoon. Many of the Spring projects have pretty uniformly moved to GitHub in the last year, and it's good to see Spring Security join the flock. Blogger Madytyoo has an interesting blog on using the DHTMLX project with the Spring framework. Markus Eisele has written up a blog series on the Heroes of Java. He did a very informative interview with SpringSource founder Rod Johnson for the latest installment in the series. [Less]

Happy new year! I hope your new year and holidays were amazing. And, welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring. This year is going to be incredible, so let's dive right into it. This week's roundup features some ... [More] content from the last few weeks. Particularly, we've got content that InfoQ put up from the SpringOne2GX 2011 conference. Thank you InfoQ for sharing this great content, as usual. Garry Russel and David Turanski's SpringOne2GX presentation on implementing highly available architectures using Spring Integration is now up on InfoQ. Rob Winch demoes some of the new features in Spring Security 3.1: multiple http elements, stateless authentication mode for RESTful services, Debug Filter, CAS support for proxy tickets, JAAS, etc. This is another great presentation from SpringOne2GX 2011. Rossen Stoyanchev's presentation at SpringOne2GX 2011 on the new features in Spring MVC 3.1 is now up over at InfoQ. Community member and DevNexus organizer Gunnar Hillert has put together an awesome blog on a powerful, if underrated new feature in Spring 3.1: support for validating business service methods using JSR 303 and Spring. This support is manifest in the Spring MVC REST support for validating marshalled entities that are part of the request. But, as Gunnar explains, the facility can be used generically in any service tier. Blogger Mrabti has the second part of his series on using Spring and GWT together. Check it out to learn about his architecture and how he used Spring Roo and Spring Data together. Pro Spring co-author and Spring community member Jan Machacek has put together a great blog on using the Specs2 Spring testing framework to test your Spring applications. Specs2 is a good way to learn Scala, and to test your application. Tomasz Nurkiewicz has put together a post on exposing Hibernate's and EhCache's statistics using Spring's JMX exporters. The code's written in Scala, but should translate naturally for those conversant in Java. One little niggle is that he subclasses classes to expose them, which doesn't quite feel right. Sure, it works, but it's probably not required. In the case of the javax.sql.DataSource, you can simply reference it when configuring a org.springframework.jmx.export.MBeanExporter. Obtaining the native EntityManagerFactory isn't difficult, either and shouldn't require a subclass, as the AbstractEntityManagerFactoryBean base class exposes a public nativeEntityManagerFactory field which might have worked instead. Anyway, the concepts are interesting, and - in the end - the blog does demonstrate how to expose JMX information from objects that don't already expose them, so that's very cool. Nice job! JavaCodeGeeks has an interesting post on using Spring to build RESTful services on Google App Engine. There's very little specific to Spring here (as that just works - after all, Spring's unparalleled in its ability to work on any cloud). Instead, this post covers the minutae of configuring Google App Engine and of configuring Maven, and so on. A worthy read if you're looking for the details. Blogger John Varghese has an interesting (if slightly not technical) write up of enterprise application development with Spring Roo. SpringSource founder and all around great guy Rod Johnson's presentation at QCon, Things I'd Wish I'd Known, is also up on InfoQ. Rod is a charming presenter and it's great to hear him talk about the exhilarating (if sometimes nerve-wracking) development of SpringSource. [Less]

Here is more great content from SpringOne 2GX 2011, this time a complete update to Spring MVC 3.1 covering URI variables, Redirect & Flash attributes, UriComponentsBuilder, Multipart Request Support, and HDIV Integration. This video ... [More] presentation is by Rossen Stoyanchev, one of the Spring experts who commits to Spring MVC and Spring Web Flow. Many thanks to InfoQ for coming to Chicago to record so many of the fantastic SpringOne 2GX presentations. [Less]

The new year is off to a phenomenal start with more great content from SpringOne 2GX 2011, this time a detailed introduction to Getting Started with Spring Security 3.1. This video presentation is by Rob Winch, one of those amazing Spring ... [More] community members that answers all kinds of questions on the community forums. In this introduction Rob covers: The basic authentication and authorization capabilities of Spring Security New features in the 3.1 release including Stateless authentication for RESTful services More JAAS integration and support Support for multiple http elements Lots and lots of real application samples Many thanks to InfoQ for coming to Chicago to record so many of the fantastic SpringOne 2GX presentations. [Less]

In this new video interview from InfoQ, Graeme Rocher, the creator of Grails, talks about planned new features in Grails 2.0, polyglot persistence, GORM and tool support for Grails. Of course, Grails 2.0 was released last month, but is ... [More] fascinating to see how Graeme's thinking from earlier in the year wound up influencing the release. Many thanks to InfoQ for taking the time to talk to the Grails experts and providing this outstanding interview to the community. [Less]

Welcome back to the final installment of This Week in Spring for 2011. It's incredible to think that we've been doing this for a year already! Where has the time gone? Time flies when you're having fun, as they say... The hope has ... [More] always been that these roundups would make it easier for developers to take the pulse of the Spring community. Between the announcements and releases and content from SpringSource and VMware and the incredible deluge of content authored by the community, there is always something interesting happening, somewhere. While there is a lot of interesting content this week, we'll defer the usual reviews until next week. This week, we're going to reflect on the year that was 2011 for the Spring community. Spring 3.1 Development of Spring 3.1 began in earnest in early 2010, and by SpringOne 2GX 2010 we already had an idea of what it was going to look like. By the beginning of this year, we already had milestones to play with. As the year progressed, we saw numerous new milestones, followed in short order by release candidates. The release candidates progressed and then, finally, a couple of weeks ago, we got Spring 3.1 GA. Among the many new, exciting features and themes in Spring 3.1, there is A much improved Java configuration model Enhanced, Java-only configuration for JPA and Spring MVC applications. Profiles, which let you describe beans in your configuration twice and then activate a given definition based on the environment in which the application's running. An Environment abstraction A declarative, annotation-driven caching model An improved unit testing story Hibernate 4 support Of course, if you want to see all these 3.1 details demonstrated live, you should sign up for the Spring 3.1 Webinar on January 19th (Europe, North America). As useful as this all is, I think the prospect of releases of all the other Spring projects that will build on 3.1 really make 2012 a very exciting year. The Cloud and Cloud Foundry In April of this year, SpringSource and VMWare launched Cloud Foundry, the open source Platform as a Service. Cloud Foundry can be run on-premise. Cloud Foundry is an open-source Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Cloud Foundry works with many languages, runtimes, and services. And, if the list of supported services and runtimes wasn't enough, one only had to wait to see Scala support, PostgreSQL support, RabbitMQ support and .NET support added in the months that followed. Cloud Foundry works brilliantly with Spring applications. You can use the <cloud> namespace or Java configuration in tandem with the Cloud Foundry library to interrogate and work with the services provisioned by Cloud Foundry. Spring 3.1 profiles can be used to to good effect on Cloud Foundry to conditionally reference data sources that are managed by the cloud when your application's run in the cloud. Spring AMQP and Spring Integration make it simple to build messaging applications using RabbitMQ on Cloud Foundry, and the Spring Data projects make it dead simple to build applications that work with MongoDB, and Redis on Cloud Foundry. There is of course Grails support and Spring Roo support. Cloud Foundry released Micro Cloud Foundry, a virtual machine with a fully configured cloud that you could use to develop your Spring applications locally. To support automated builds with Cloud Foundry, developers can use the Maven plugin. Big Data 2011 delivered the implementation of the NoSQL data integration vision that Rod Johnson described way back at SpringOne 2GX 2010. This year saw many Spring Data projects reach or exceed 1.0 releases (and the numerous milestones and release candidates that precede GA releases!), including Spring Data JPA and Spring Data Neo4J, Spring Data MongoDB, Spring Data Redis, Spring Data GemFire, and the evolution of numerous other interesting projects like Spring Hadoop, and the concept of Spring Data Repositories. Mobile and The Next Generation Web The web's a big place, and it comes in many form factors. Today, delivering an application means delivering it through the web, and on mobile platforms like Android and iOS. A huge part of building better mobile applications is building RESTful services for communication between client and a server in a standard, interoperable way. Spring Core provides the RestTemplate which facilitates RESTful communication between clients and servers. Spring Android provides support for consuming RESTful web services from Android devices. This year even saw the creation of some great information for building cleaner Android applications overall. As powerful as REST is, it can't be the full story. A critical piece of the pie is security, and authorization. After all, Facebook can't very well go around exposing your data through a RESTful service that you haven't explicitly authorized it to. The last few years bore witness to the rise of the various OAuth standards, and implementations by the various service providers like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Spring Social went GA this year and it supports communication with these services through OAuth. Spring Android also supports Spring Social, making it ideally trivial to consume OAuth-secured, RESTful services from Android applications. Additionally, Spring Security OAuth, a project for Spring Security that's dedicated to helping people expose secured services using OAuth, started its march to GA this year, as well. SpringOne 2GX The biggest SpringOne 2GX conference ever was hosted in Chicago in October. It was a fantastic confluence of great technology, phenomenal presentations and the wonderful people from the Spring Community (that is you guys!). The conference keynotes kicked things off perfectly with Adrian Colyer talking about Spring Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow while Ben Alex followed up with Next Generation Applications. If you were not able to join us in Chicago this year, or if like me, you were unable to attend all the talks you wanted to see, then you won't want to miss the series of SpringOne talks that InfoQ recorded. It is a great way to learn about Messaging for Modern Applications, Spring Data Neo4J, Making Mobile Web Native with PhoneGap and many other great topics. That's it for this week and year! Happy new year! We look forward to seeing you next year! [Less]

Dear Spring Developers and Graphistas, We're happy to present you with the release of Spring Data Neo4j 2.0 as a small Christmas gift from our side. Spring Data Neo4j is based on Neo4j 1.6.M02. The major feature of this release is the addition ... [More] of a simple mapping mode (spring-data-neo4j). Just annotate your POJOs and use a GraphRepository for the usual CRUD and advanced query operations. For graph-attached POJOs and high performance use-cases, you can employ the advanced mapping mode (spring-data-neo4j-aspects), which leverages AspectJ to enhance your domain class. Both mapping modes use the same underlying code, which is now based on the Spring Data Commons mapping infrastructure. We improved the Cypher graph query language support by supporting new Cypher features, adding queries derived from finder-methods to the repositories and extended the result handling conversions to include projections to mapping-interfaces, Pages and more. Besides also adding preliminary geospatial support provided by the Neo4j-spatial project, we also support new, type-safe Cypher-DSL which can also be used in conjunction with Query-DSL. The example project are now included with the main source tree so that they are always up-to-date. The cineasts tutorial app is also included in the examples in 3 versions (simple mapping, advanced mapping, REST). Thanks to the recent public availability of the Neo4j Add-On on Heroku, we included a chapter on how to deploy a Spring Data Neo4j application into the Heroku cloud. You’ll also find an accompanying example application called “todos” that is ready for deployment. Special Thanks to James and Werner from Junisphere for all the code contributions and fixes. In the last few weeks we got a lot more feedback on the Spring Forums, on JIRA and on the Neo4j Mailing list. We used your help to remove bugs, improve behaviour and documentation. Thanks a lot to everyone who reported issues and contributed insights. To learn more about Spring Data Neo4j make sure to watch the introductory webinar by the project lead Michael Hunger and have a look at the extensive guide book. The detailed presentation from the Spring One conference is available on InfoQ. And then please get your hands dirty and include Spring Data Neo4j in your holiday project which you could use to look at your domain with a fresh perspective. Happy Holidays! The Spring-Data and Neo4j Team Project resources: Downloads | Reference Card | JavaDocs | Spring Data Graph Guide Book | Changelog | GitHub Repository [Less]

Spring Framework 3.0.7 is now available via Maven Central, the SpringSource repository, or for direct download from our community download page. This maintenance release includes important bugfixes and minor improvements and is a recommended upgrade. Happy holidays! Download | Documentation | Javadoc API | Change Log | JIRA

Dear Spring Community, to go on with SpringSource Christmas presents I'd like to announce the availability of Spring Data Mongo 1.0 GA. The release marks the end of a long road to the first step of developing sophisticated data access using a MongoDB ... [More] datastore. The overall feature set includes: MongoTemplate to simplify performing common Mongo operations, including map-reduce and geo spatial queries Spring namespace to configure MongoDB instances, replica sets and JMX monitoring MongoConverter for domain class mapping and persistence Spring Data repositories support MongoDB Log4j appender Cross-store persistance - support for JPA Entities with fields transparently persisted/retrieved using MongoDB Java based Query, Criteria, and Update DSLs QueryDSL integration Part of that release is the release of Spring Data Commons 1.2 GA which contains most of the core functionality of the high-level functionality such as entity mapping and repository abstraction. Note that we will remove the Spring Data Document repository from GitHub as we moved it to the Spring Data MongoDB repository in October already. Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog The release is available from our Maven repository and will be available in Maven Central in a bit. To learn more about the project, visit the Spring Data MongoDB Page. Looking forward to your feedback on the forum or in the issue tracker. [Less]

In this video Alan Stewart, SpringSource project lead for Spring Roo gives a guided tour of the newest features in the 1.2 release. Alan demonstrates Roo's capabilities for multi-module Maven projects, JSF/PrimeFaces integration, changes to service ... [More] layering on top of repositories and database reverse engineering support for multi-schema. Be sure to thumbs up the presentation if you find it useful and subscribe to the SpringSourceDev channel to receive updates about all the latest presentation recordings and screencasts. [Less]