Spring Framework

Where has the time gone? Honestly! It seems like we just started this merry little adventure into 2011. I was still recuperating from the explosion of great content and ideas that was SpringOne 2010. Heck, we had SpringOne 2010 videos on InfoQ well ... [More] into this year! And yet time marches on, and here we are, staring down the barrel of SpringOne2GX 2011 in just a few weeks! If you haven't already registered, do! If you have registered, bring your thinking caps (or, helmets). This year's going to be insane. Even if I could tell you more, we've got a lot content to go over! So, with that... Are you, like the throngs of people who descended on the SpringSource booth last week at JavaOne, curious about the CloudFoundry project? The CloudFoundry team has put together this video demonstrating how to use CloudFoundry from the SpringSource Tool Suite and from Ruby. Check it out for a whirlwind tour of CloudFoundry. Apache Tomcat engineer Mark Thomas introduces the Servlet 3 support for "fragments" in Apache Tomcat 7. Cool stuff, and the example's on-point for the imminent Spring 3.1 release. Good stuff, Mark! The Java Code Geeks introduce Spring Insight, the powerful agent that lives in the tc Server Developer Edition. For a great, in depth look at Spring Insight, check out this post. The Spring Social project's taken on a life of its own! It seems like every week there's a new implementation that's being built on top of the powerful, foundational connection and autorization APIs that Spring Social provides. Google+, the new social network from Google, is an oft-demanded integration. Unfortunately, there was no API available until just recently. In what seems like minutes after the announcement, Bozhidar Bozhanov had rushed in to provide a Spring Social API for Google+. Nice job, Bozhidar! If you want to get started with Spring Social, be sure to check out Spring Social lead Craig Walls' webinar recording introducing Spring Social. BSB has written a bit about how to use Spring Batch to handle staging of data in a batch job. It introduces the core SPIs, ItemReader, ItemWriter, and ItemProcessor, and then shows how to seed a batch job using a StagingItemProcessor. Good stuff! This is another example of how the strong reliance on flexible SPIs make Spring extensible to new use cases that weren't envisioned in the original design. Nice job, guys! Sivaprasadreddy Katamreddy demonstrates how to go beyond the built-in Spring support for Quartz, the popular open source job scheduling engine, and leverage annotations to drive the registration and configuration of new Quartz jobs. This post is doubly useful: it makes the Spring and Quartz integration as smooth as silk, on par with the inbuilt support for scheduling with Spring's own @Scheduled annotation, and it shows how - with a little bit of coding, you can leverage Spring's fantastic component model and rich SPIs to extend the framework and build micro-frameworks. Your humble editor was recently asked about good content to get started with Neo4J, the graph database, and Spring Data Graph, the Spring Data integration for Neo4J. I answered the question, but decided it might be helpful for others. Check out this little listing of useful links to learn Neo4J and Spring Data Graph. Alex Soto builds a Yaml HttpMessageConverter. Yaml (short for "Yet another markup language") provides a human-readable and writable representation of data (like JSON, but even simpler). Yaml is a natural choice for REST services, because it's so easy to interact with. The HttpMessageConverter SPI, in Spring's web support, is used to drive how Spring marshals an object over an HTTP request (or response) and vice-vera, from an object into some type of payload that can be encoaded in an HTTP request (or response). Ashish Sarin, author of the Spring Roo 1.1 Cookbook from PACKT, has written up an introduction to the AspectJ inter-type declaration (ITD) language. This is not required reading if you're using Spring Roo, but it is very cool to see what's possible, and having such an able introduction's very helpful! Chad Lung provides a useful recipe for setting up Tomcat authentication using the DataSourceRealm on CentOS 6 and MySQL. There's nothing Spring-specific to this post, but it's a useful recipe if you're using Apache Tomcat! Alex Soto is at it again! This time, he introduces REST, the architectual concept, and then backs it up with a concreate example using Spring MVC. Roger Hughes introduces Spring's @Required annotation. His post explores a not only how to use the annotation, but when. It is a compelling read for one of Spring's most powerful gems, and best kept secrets. Nice job, Roger! Roger Hughes introduces Spring's AOP support, particularly, the @AfterThrowing annotation, which lets you intercept a method invocation just after an exception's been thrown but before it's been handled. Fascinating read, and a nice reminder of the power that bubbles just beneath the surface of the framework. [Less]

The Cloud Foundry team has been hard at working making their new open platform as a service to be as easy to use as possible. This new video provides a basic introduction to Cloud Foundry and provides demonstrations for Spring using STS as well as ... [More] demos for Ruby development. If you haven't had a chance to try out Cloud Foundry yet, then this is a great place for you to start. 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 or the CloudFoundry channel to receive updates about all the latest presentation recordings and screencasts. [Less]

The Cloud Foundry team has been hard at working making their new open platform as a service to be as easy to use as possible. This new video provides a basic introduction to Cloud Foundry and provides demonstrations for Spring using STS as well as ... [More] demos for Ruby development. If you haven't had a chance to try out Cloud Foundry yet, then this is a great place for you to start. 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 or the CloudFoundry channel to receive updates about all the latest presentation recordings and screencasts. [Less]

What a crazy week! JavaOne is underway, and the SpringSource / CloudFoundry booth has been the hub of activity on the showroom floor. To all those who we've talked to, the relevant links include the open source code for CloudFoundry, the ... [More] SpringSource blog, and of course the blog introducing the MicroCloud Foundry for Spring Developers and, generally, the Youtube SpringSource channel. Lots of content, so let's get to it! Did you miss last week's excellent webinar by Craig Walls, lead of the Spring Social project? We rushed the webinar video through production and have it available for you to watch on SpringSource's Youtube channel. A new video by Ben Corrie introduces the challenges of memory management with virtualization and Java, along with an introduction to the answer. Apparently this is the first in a series of presentations on this topic so I'm really looking forward to learning more. The new Apache Tomcat 7.0.22 release includes bug fixes and new features compared to version 7.0.21 including: Further improvements to the memory leak detection and prevention features. Fix issue that prevented using SSL with the HTTP BIO connector and Java 7 Add support for controlling which session attributes are replicated when using session replication (a.k.a clustering). John Ferguson blogs about using Spring dependencies in your acceptance tests with Thucydides. From the article, "Spring provides excellent support for integration tests, via the SpringJUnit4ClassRunner test runner. Unfortunately, if you are using Thucydides, this is not an option, as a test cannot have two runners at the same time. Fortunately, however, there is a solution!" Roger Hughes takes a look at using Spring Interceptors in your Spring MVC web application. Bozhidar Bozhanov introduces a solution to Hibernate listeners that are managed by Spring. This blog post by Alex Soto introduces the claim-check pattern with Spring Integration and MongoDB. Good stuff! Ashish Sarin, author of the Spring Roo 1.1 Cookbook from PAKT, talks about tips for how to get the most out of the Spring Roo development tool. Ashish Sarin also introduces how to do Spring MVC scaffolding with Spring Roo. [Less]

Spring Social is an extension of the Spring Framework that enables applications to connect with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as Facebook and Twitter and interact with those services on behalf of their users. This presentations by Craig ... [More] Walls introduces Spring Social essentials such as connecting to service providers and using Spring Social's API bindings. Craig also describes how to add provider-based sign in and how to extend Spring Social's service provider support. 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]

Spring Social is an extension of the Spring Framework that enables applications to connect with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as Facebook and Twitter and interact with those services on behalf of their users. This presentations by Craig ... [More] Walls introduces Spring Social essentials such as connecting to service providers and using Spring Social's API bindings. Craig also describes how to add provider-based sign in and how to extend Spring Social's service provider support. 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]

Well Spring was still the hottest topic at JavaOne 2011? The SpringSource booth (number 5402) was crammed with people asking about Spring, Grails and Cloud Foundry. There is still time to catch the sessions by the SpringSource technologists: ... [More] Java Workloads in the Cloud (24701) - Scott Andrews and Ramnivas Laddad Simplify Your JMS Code With Spring (22585) - Bruce Snyder Caching and Data Grids Patterns and Tips (22500) - Costin Leau Building Cloud-Ready Systems with Modern Open Technologies (17381) - Oleg Zhurakousky Fewer Hoops with Hadoop and Spring (22501) - Costin Leau Java Enterprise Applications in the Cloud: Fast, Fun and Easier than Ever (22120) - Stefan Schmidt & Gordon Dickens What's New in Groovy 1.8 (23940) - Guillaume Laforge What's New in Grails 1.4 (24262) - Graeme Rocher Polyglot Persistence in the Cloud with Grails and Java EE (24280) - Graeme Rocher Of course, if you are dedicated member of the Spring community, then SpringOne 2GX 2011 in Chicago is really the event for you. We are just weeks away so be sure to register now! [Less]

This short video is the first in a series of presentations about Java usage in virtual machines, in particular focusing on memory management. In this presentation Ben Corrie describes that basic notions of memory management in virtual environments ... [More] and the different behavior of memory in the application, JVM, operating system and hypervisor. If you are running Java on a virtual machine or plan to host mulitple Java applications in a shared virtual environment, then this series of talks will be invaluable. 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]

What a week! Lots of content and so precious little time, so we'll get right into it. First, some programming notes: SpringSource will be at JavaOne. If you're there, then be sure to visit the SpringSource booth in the exhibitors hall and say hi ... [More] and meet-'n-greet with engineers from SpringSource, yours truly included. Likewise, there is a lot of fine content from the SpringSource team at JavaOne itself, so make sure to add them to your schedule! Finally, what're you guys doing Thursday morning? Say around 10 AM PST in North America, or 3 PM GMT in Europe? Well, if you're not busy, let's have a social get together! Just you, me, Craig Walls, and several thousand of our closest friends. Craig Walls is putting on a webinar introducing Spring Social. This webinar will introduce Spring Social essentials such as connecting to service providers and using Spring Social's API bindings. We'll also see how to add provider-based sign in and how to extend Spring Social's service provider support. RSVP ASAP! Gunnar Hillert, resident nice guy and integration expert, has put together a blog explaining how to use the new CloudFoundry Maven plugin to deploy applications as part of the build. Um.. so what are you still reading this for? That's really cool, go check it out! We'll wait... SpringSource Tool Suite 2.8.0.M2 Released! The new release has lots of features, including Spring 3.1 support, c-namespace content-assist, quick-fix and validation, an update to the new m2e plugin (which is the plugin formerly-known-as-Pri...sorry, wrong one, it's the plugin-formerly-known-as-m2eclipse), and much more. Spring GemFire 1.1.0.M3 Released The new release features improved support for indicies, as well as improved region creation. Check it out! This video provides a live coding introduction to the Spring Data JPA project by Oliver Gierke. Spring JPA aims to significantly improve the implementation of data access layers by reducing the effort to the amount that's actually needed. This post explains how to create type-safe queries with MongoDB and QueryDSL. Steve Harris explains how to use Ehcache Project's Spring annotations to handle declarative caching with Ehcache. This is a nice post, complete with sample code. NB: these annotations refer to the Ehcache specific annotations, and not to the generic Spring Cache abstraction present in the imminent Spring 3.1 release. Good stuff, but going forward, you might consider using the more generic abstraction in Spring core. Using Spring Social? Using Google+? Of course you are. And, so are many others. To fill the gap, the community's put together an initial integration at a Google+ API Spring Social API. To learn more, check out this post on a project to provide Spring Social integration with Google's APIs, starting with Google+ and Google Contacts. Ashish Sarin has written a post on how to create JPA entities with Spring Roo. Nice post! Ashish, as you no doubt know, is the author of Packt publishing's Spring Roo 1.1 Cookbook, which is an interesting read. Faithful readers of this roundup will no doubt know the name Gordon Dickens, who has come in this week with not one, but two posts on using Spring in the cloud this week. The first post introduces using Spring Roo with CloudFoundry. Very cool! The second post talks about using Spring Roo with CloudBees, an alternative cloud. Spring (and the projects that build on it like Grails and Spring Roo) has always had a strong portability story, and this just exemplifies that feature. Now, if you want to take your application further, and want portability, then definitely consider CloudFoundry as your PaaS choice. Remember, portability matters! Using SpringSource Tool Suite? One of my favorite features are the template projects, which provide ready-to-use, pre-configured starter projects. To access them, you go to File > New > Spring Template Project, and then choose one. There are lots to choose from - Spring Batch Admin, Spring MVC, etc. However, one of the most popular is sure to be the Spring MVC template, which comes with a ready-to-use Maven pom.xml that is, well, perhaps a bit overloaded! This blog post disects that template's pom.xml, providing guidance for developers who want to know which parts of the pom.xml are optional, and what they do. Good stuff! And, I think some of the feedback can be incorporated into the templates in future iterations of STS ;-) This post introduces AOP and AspectJ terminology which can be very useful if you're looking to Spring's AOP support for the first time. Good stuff! This post, Getting started with Spring Integration v2 and Enterprise Integration Patterns - A Simple Example using File and Mail Adapters explains... well... how to get started with Spring Integration, version 2.0, using the file and mail adapters. Nice work! Ashish is at it again this week, this time with a post on how to setup a simple project using Spring Roo. Good stuff, and always helpful for the stalwart Roo developer... Swapping Out Spring Bean Configuration at Runtime This admittedly very introductory post explains how to use Netbeans 7, Maven and the Spring Framework. [Less]

Dear Spring Community, We are pleased to announce the third milestone release 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 new milestone updates include: Dedicated support for indecies Improved region creation 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]