Spring Framework

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Hello from Devoxx! We're on the road, talking about the Spring technologies, Grails, Cloud Foundry and more at Devoxx this week! There are numerous talks to ... [More] attend from SpringSource presenters, including yours truly, on all manner of topics. There is a lot of great content this week at Devoxx. We have already presented a university talk introducing Spring on Cloud Foundry (as well as Spring Data and Spring AMQP), and another talk introducing Spring Data JPA's support for repositories (though of course they'll eventually be on Parleys.com!), but there's still plenty of other talks to see! Here's the full schedule: Wednesday NoSQL for Java Developers ( room 5, 16:40-17:40) What's new in Groovy 1.8 and beyond? ( room 4, 16:40-17:40) Productivity Enhancement in Spring 3.1 (room 5, 17:50-18:50) Thursday Cloud is such stuff as dreams are made on ( room 8, 10:50-11:50) Socializing Your Spring applications ( room 4, 10:50-11:50) The Quickie Prototype, or, Getting the Job Done Before Lunch (room 9, 13:15-13:30) Cloud Foundry and Spring, a marriage made in heaven (room 3, 15:10-16:10) Spring Roo: instant Productivity (room 8, 16:40-17:40) Spring BOF (BOF room 2, 19:00-20:00) If you are at the show, stop by the booth to ask all your Spring, Grails, and Cloud Foundry questions. Spring Gemfire lead Costin Leau has announced that Spring Gemfire 1.1.0.RC1 Has Been Released for Java. Among other things, this release has aligned Maven naming to Spring Data conventions (new ids are org.springframework.data/spring-data-gemfire), introduced PDX attributes on cache and client-cache namespace, and upgraded to GemFire 6.6.1. Michael Hunger has announced that Spring Data Neo4J 2.0.0.RC1 Has Been Released. The new release is packed with new features. Among other things, the new release has been updated dependencis for Neo4j to 1.5 and for AspectJ to 1.6.12, added repository support for the new Cypher-DSL (1.5.M1) (with QueryDSL support), added extended result-handling-dsl to allow changes of container classes, added examples for hello-worlds and cypher for both mapping options, added support for @RelationshipEntity to have a fallback relationship-type attribute, added support for (mutable) @RelatedToVia collections (like Set), and much more. For the full details (there are lots more), please see the changelog. Thomas Risberg's continuing the recent Using Cloud Foundry Services with Spring blog series. His post, on using the <cloud:> namespace with your Spring XML application contexts, provides a deep look at these very powerful new features. The fourth installment of Using Cloud Foundry with Spring, by Scott Andrews, details how the pieces you've learned about in the previous blog installments can be used with Spring 3.1's profiles to isolate Cloud Foundry-specific services in your Spring application. This is a fantastic look at a very useful feature in Spring 3.1 that marries quite nicely with the Cloud Foundry development paradigm. IBM Developer Works has published the latest installment of its Spring Roo exploration series. This post, on using Spring Roo in the cloud with Cloud Foundry is sensational! This series has introduced Spring Roo very nicely in the previous three posts (introducing Spring Roo, part 1, and introducing Spring Roo, part 2, and building Spring Roo addons, part 3). This post carries the theme forward and talks about deployment to Cloud Foundry and the nice environment Cloud Foundry provides for Spring Roo applications. The nice engineers at CarFax have put together some blueprint projects detailing how to use Spring and RabbitMQ together and then made them available on GitHub! CarFax, of course, is a very well known auto history verification service, and it's quite cool to see their experience shared with the community. Nice job, guys! Eugen Paraschiv (or @baeldung) continues his great posts on building web applications with Spring. In the fourth of his posts, he focuses on discoverability of the REST API, HATEOAS and practical scenarios driven by tests. In the fifth, also just published, he writes about actual implementation of the HATEOAS constraints. This is a very useful and articulate post on the concepts that are crucial to successful implementations. Tomcat Expert has a great post about the finer points of Apache Tomcat's valves, a mechanism that can be applied application-server wide to provide enhanced functionality in much the same way you might use a Servlet Filter. Ayberk Cansever has written up a cool post on using Spring Security to integrate with LDAP. This is a detailed page with great, step-by-step instructions for a common integration story. By the way, I just discovered a blog, Professional VMWare, which seems to have some pretty good content introducing people to the virtualization side of VMware. This is useful for developers who want to learn more about the platform side of things. In particular, I found the this video, introducing the vCloud architecture (the VMware solution for IaaS) to be very informative! [Less]

Dear Spring Community, We are pleased to announce the first release candidate of the Spring GemFire 1.1 project is now available! The Spring GemFire project aims to make it easier to build Spring-powered highly scalable applications using GemFire as ... [More] distributed data management platform. The updates in this release include: Aligned Maven naming to Spring Data conventions (new ids are org.springframework.data/spring-data-gemfire) Introduced PDX attributes on cache and client-cache namespace Upgrade to GemFire 6.6.1 To learn more about the project, visit the Spring GemFire homepage. Download it now: Spring GemFire for Java | Spring GemFire for .NET We look forward to your feedback! [Less]

Dear Spring Community, The Spring Data Team and Neo Technology have just released the Release Candidate 1 of Spring Data Neo4j, the integration library for Neo4j the Enterprise NOSQL database. Integrating the feedback from the very successful ... [More] SpringOne 2011 and our community we exended the previous Milestone release with new functionality and took care of reported issues. If you'd like to get an Introduction to Spring Data Neo4j, watch out for our presentations/webinars. Changes Updated Neo4j to 1.5 AspectJ to 1.6.12 Added repository support for the new Cypher-DSL (1.5.M1) (with QueryDSL support) Updated cypher syntax changes for 1.5 Extended result-handling-dsl to allow changes of container classes Added examples for hello-worlds and cypher for both mapping options @RelationshipEntity has an fallback relationship-type attribute Support for (mutable) @RelatedToVia collections (like Set) Relationship-Entities can now be directly instantiated and persisted Introduced the concept of a MappingPolicy for the POJO mapping mode (currently @Fetch) Simplified cineasts using annotated and derived queries on repositories Added repository for access of relationship-related methods Improved support for collection properties List, Set, Collection, Page as return types on derived and annotated query methods This is the last step before the final release of the new major version, so we're looking for even more feedback to provide an excellent GA release of Spring Data Neo4j. Please provide it in the forum or the issue tracker. Project resources: Downloads | Reference Card | JavaDocs | Spring Data Graph Guide Book | Changelog | GitHub Repository [Less]

Another fantastic week in the Spring community. Can you guys believe it's already the 8th of November? Where does the time go? If you blink, we'll be in 2012 already! No time to waste - the year might change out from underneath us! - let's ... [More] dive right into this week's roundup! Ramnivas Laddad, senior engineer on the Cloud Foundry project and a hero world wide to those who - like me - enjoy the use of AspectJ in their Spring applications, has put together a fantastic post shining a light on the specific support for services (like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and RabbitMQ) in Cloud Foundry. This is the second post in a series. Read the first one to learn about the basics of services on Cloud Foundry. Awesome posts with great details. This next post is among the posts that made me smile this week. Roy Clarkson and I did a talk at SpringOne 2GX a few weeks ago on native Android development practices with Spring. We sat down the night before our talk and ran through our deck and demonstrations, only to realize that - in the interim weeks since everything was originally prepared, the delicate spider's web of configuration required to get Eclipse (SpringSource Tool Suite), Maven, and Android all speaking to each other and working correctly had been... disturbed. We did the talk with a non-Maven build with great success, but it still irked us that we had to switch to a regular Eclipse build so that the talk could proceed. Roy, always intrepid and fearless, has since figured out the right permutations of configurations required to get this all working again and - generous guy that he is - he has documented everything in this blog. Check it out! (I know I did!) Tomcat Expert has another practical column on administering and developing with Apache Tomcat 7. The post explains how to take the default security configuration Apache Tomcat 7 to the next level with a bit of background on the configuration options available. Roger Hughes introduces how to use JSR 250's @PostConstruct and @PreDestroy annotations to replace the use of the corresponding Spring callback interfaces, InitializingBean and DisposableBean. Michal Huniewicz explains how to create a wizard form with Spring MVC. His solution's certainly one way to solve the problem (and worth a look), but as Spring MVC engineer Rossen Stoyanchev notes in the comments, developers should alternatively consider Spring Web Flow for these types of use cases, as well. Yet another great post dissecting one of Spring's oft-misunderstood nuances by Roger Hughes! This post introduces Spring @MVC's @ModelAttribute. The attribute can be handy when... what am I doing? Go, read the post! It's great! Want to run your Spring application on Google App Engine? Want to use their not-quite-there SQL support through Hibernate? Want Hibernate to not be painful? Use Spring. This post shows how to use Spring to setup HibernateDao on Google App Engine. It sounds like this particular blogger is only using Spring to make the most of Hibernate, which is a shame. Spring runs really nicely on Google App Engine, and so users are encouraged to exploit its full power in that environment, too. Readers of this column will know that we often try to link to posts about Tomcat administration that are real world. Why? Because Tomcat's powerful and also the most widely used application server for Java developers, and sometimes developers need to blur the lines between developer and system administrator to develop applications in an environment that faithfully replicates production. This week's link, on load balancing with Apache Tomcat by fronting it with Apache HTTPD, is no different. Great introduction, and a great topic. At this point, however, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the easiest way to get this exact behavior with no configuration at all is to use Cloud Foundry, the open source PaaS project. Simply deploy your application to Cloud Foundry and then ratchet up the number of instances of that application. You'll instantly get round robin dispatching among the deployed instances. This is quick and easy, in development or in production! Just sayin'...! Ashish Sarin, as readers of this column will know, really digs Spring Roo. He's just announced a Spring Roo podcast, and I couldn't be happier. I'll certainly be checking it out, and you should too. Here's the announcement with details. Chad Lung has put together a great introduction on how to build a Spring-Data project with MongoDB in under 5 minutes using Netbeans 7 and Maven. Spring makes it easy, no matter which build tool and IDE you're using, of course, but it's nice to have specific goals in mind when approaching this sort of integration, and this post is nothing if not specific! Read on! The United States Navy used Magnolia, the CMS, along with Spring to build their Navy.com portal and landing page. The web site is - among other things - the focal point of a high volume recruitment campaign here in the US. Magnolia's putting on a webinar that explains "how Campbell Ewald (Navy's digital agency) used Magnolia's Blossom module for straightforward app integration and how Blossom enabled Spring developers to work efficiently with Magnolia CMS right from the start." This could be interesting indeed. To learn more, check out the webinar registration page. Using vCloud Director (VMware's turnkey IaaS solution)? Want to publish notifications about system state using AMQP (and RabbitMQ)? Read this post. 'Nuff said. [Less]

The Grails team has been driving toward the imminent release of Grails 2, a substantial upgrade to the hugely popular rapid development tool. This video by Peter Ledbrook introduces the new usability features that improve productivity, such as the ... [More] new interactive command line, improved class reloading, and much better unit testing support. The video also covers powerful new features such as 'where' queries, database migrations, and static resource (CSS, JS, etc.) handling. If you are currently using Grails or thinking about trying it out, then you must watch this video: Better Productivity: Grails 2.0. There is also a shorter version of the presentation that just demonstrates Cloud Foundry. 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]

Wow! Last week's SpringOne 2GX event was sensational. It was an amazing time, and it was - as usual - great to see the Spring community going so strong. I can't wait until the videos from the event start to appear on InfoQ.com. We've got a ... [More] lot to cover this week, though, so let's get into it! Don't tell anyone, but even if you missed SpringOne 2GX, the decks for all the talks should be on SpringOne2GX.com, and the videos for all the talks will be on InfoQ.com soon. To tide you over in the short term, the deck from SpringSource CTO Adrian Colyer's keynote - "Spring yesterday, today, and tomorrow" - is available online. Thanks Adrian! One of the many big announcements that came from the SpringOne2GX event was that of Neo4j 2.0. If you're curious to learn more about how Spring (through the Spring Data Neo4j project) can work with Neo4J, check out this page. Eugene also wrote a three part(!!) series on building a RESTful web service with Spring 3.1 and Java configuration! Here's part 1, on bootstrapping a web application with Java configuration, and part 2, on building a RESTful web service with Spring and part 3, on securing the web application. Great job, Eugene! At SpringOne 2GX just last week, two different people approached me about their use cases for multi-tenancy with Spring and Hibernate. Ken DeLong, who I met last week, has written a blog post on the strategy he took and was kind enough to share with us. Nice job, Ken, and thanks! At the JAX London Spring track today, Eberhard Wolff gave an interesting talk on using Spring with Scala, and posted the slides. Good stuff and a welcome entry in the ever growing number of use cases for Spring and Scala. Johnny Ren has posted a high level overview (no code-level specifics) of the steps to securing a web application using Spring Security over on the JBoss blogs, in Understanding Spring Security and Role Based Access Control. I think this is useful because it points out some of what's possible with Spring and Spring Security, and you're free from there to pursue the specifics after. Good stuff! Time after time the Spring source code base has been audited by independant third parties. They review aspects of the code like code coverage, warnings, etc, and - as often as not - they review how clean the source code itself is. It is, of course, among the cleanest and most reliable code bases in open source. This latest analysis checks the code base for its adherance to GRASP patterns. (I'll spoil the results for you - of course it comes out roses! That doesn't make the analysis any less interesting.) Check it out! By the by, for those curious about how the code's stayed so clean and well designed, check out Spring project lead's interview on the Software Engineering podcast a few years ago, in which he details his approach to keeping code organized and to evolving it. There are lots of goodies in Spring 3.1, but one that has received a lot of attention is the updated testing support. Testing's an important part to enterprise software development, and Spring's always made this important task as easy as possible. Check out the Java Code Geek's blog on Spring 3 Testing with JUnit 4 with ContextConfiguration and AbstractTransactionalJUnit4SpringContextTests. Want to install Tomcat 7 and Solr on Centos 5.5? Look no further than this writeup. Cobalto Labs has just announced the first release of their first version of the Scala Primavera project, which aims to bring the Scala language's expressiveness to Spring. Check it out, fellow Spring-loving Scala-heads! This blog post introduces how how to translate exceptions using Spring Roo. It's a great post, and - more to the point - it looks like there will be even more coming! I'll be happy to see even more. Nice job, Goldstift! [Less]

We are live from SpringOne! 'Nuff said! If you're here, enjoy! If you're not, you're missing out! Take heart, though, you still have this roundup to look forward to and many of the sessions will be recorded by InfoQ. So, with that, let's ... [More] get to it! Look forward to seeing you next week! Michael Hunger announced that Spring Data Neo4J 2.0.0.M1 Has Been Releeased! The new release has several new features, and has been divided into smaller submodules. spring-data-neo4j: Neo4jTemplate for easy, copying object-graph-mapping, and Spring Data Repositories using persistence entity meta information spring-data-neo4j-aspects: transparent object-graph-mapping using AspectJ spring-data-neo4j-cross-store: AspectJ based cross-store-persistence between JPA and Neo4j spring-data-neo4j-rest: transparent access of a remote Neo4j REST-Server Costin Leau has announced that Spring Data Redis 1.0.0.RC1 has been released. The new release upgrades to Spring 3.1 RC1, improves JDK 5 compatibility, and improves Spring 3.1 cache abstraction on top of Redis Thomas Risberg has announced that Spring Data MongoDB 1.0.0.M5 Has Been Released. Spring Data MongoDB provides a convenient integration with Spring and the MongoDB, including support for polyglot persistence, a MongoTemplate, and much more. Filip Hanik has started a series of blogs on getting started with Apache Tomcat. Gordon Dickens chimes in with another epic post, this one on unit testing with Spring and Mockito and PowerMock. Nice job, Gordon! Using jQuery? Using Spring MVC (Naturally!)? Want to build on a jQuery UI that does auto complete? Check out Michal Huniewicz's post introducing the topic! Ashish Sarin (author of the Spring Roo Cookbook) has put up his presentation given at the Hyderabad Silicon India conference. The presentation focuses on Spring Roo and is a good introduction for the unitiated. Continuing the common thread of unit testing with Spring this week, Alex Soto chimes in with a post on Mockito and the StaticApplicationContext to improve mocking John Dobie talks about testing RESTful web services with Maven. Ken Rimple is at it again, this time with a quick post on how to get the latest bits of Spring Roo to support addon development. [Less]

Dear Spring Community, I am happy to announce the new milestone release M5 of the Cloud Foundry Integration for the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). This milestone release includes support for debugging applications in Cloud Foundry (for local clouds ... [More] and the upcoming version of Micro Cloud Foundry). You can now start your apps in your local or micro cloud in debug mode and your Eclipse/STS debugger will automatically be connected to your app running inside of Cloud Foundry. You can set breakpoints, inspect variables, evaluate expressions, step through the app - everything you know from he good old Java debugger experience in Eclipse/STS. In addition to that the milestone includes a number of fixes and improvements to existing features. The extension is available from the Dashboard of STS or directly via this update site: http://dist.springsource.com/milestone/TOOLS/cloud/e3.6/ Its also available from the Eclipse Marketplace. A blog post about debugging applications on CF will follow shortly. Please watch the Cloud Foundry Blog for updates. Enjoy! [Less]

Dear Spring Community, I am pleased to announce that the Spring Data MongoDB 1.0 Milestone 5 release is now available! The primary goal of the Spring Data project is to make it easier to build Spring-powered applications that use new data access ... [More] technologies such as non-relational databases, map-reduce frameworks, and cloud based data services. The MongoDB module provides integration with the MongoDB document database. Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog To learn more about the project, visit the Spring Data MongoDB Page. There are a number of bug fixes and minor changes to the way certain features work. See the changelog for more details. Looking forward to your feedback on the forum or in the issue tracker. [Less]