Spring Framework

Dear Spring Community, We are pleased to announce the 1.0.0.RC3 release of Spring Social, including the 1.0.0.RC3 releases of Spring Social Facebook and Spring Social Twitter. Spring Social lets you connect your Java applications to ... [More] Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as Facebook and Twitter. This release includes fixes for bugs reported since 1.0.0.RC2, as well as a few improvements: ConnectInterceptor implementations can now add parameters to the authorization URL. Twitter TimelineOperations.updateStatus() improvements: Photos can now be uploaded along with a status update. TimelineOperations.updateStatus() now returns a Tweet object for the newly posted tweet. A status can now be posted as being a reply to an existing status. The set of sample applications has been updated, including two new examples: One to demonstrate a popup-based connection flow and another to demonstrate using Spring Social within a Facebook Canvas application. See the change logs for more information on what's new in this release (Core | Facebook | Twitter) To get the software, download the release distribution (Core | Facebook | Twitter) or simply add the maven artifacts to your project. To see it live, run through the quickstart and spin up the showcase app (updated for 1.0.0.RC3). Supplement as you go with information from the reference manual. Spring Social requires Spring Framework 3.0.5 or > to run. We recommend Spring 3.1 for new applications to take advantage of the latest advances in the core framework. See the reference manual for a full description of dependencies. We expect this to be the last release candidate for Spring Social 1.0.0 and anticipate a Spring Social 1.0.0 GA release very soon. For that reason, we urge you to try out this release candidate and give us feedback in the forum or, if you have any suggestions or find any bugs, post them in the issue tracker. We hope you enjoy using Spring Social! [Less]

We are pleased to announce that Spring AMQP 1.0 GA (for Java) has been released! You can find links to all of the resources (documentation, samples, source code, forum, issue tracker, etc) at the Spring AMQP Home Page. The artifacts are available in ... [More] the SpringSource Maven repository as well as Maven Central. This project has been extremely popular during its milestone and release-candidate phases, and we would like to thank those of you in the community who have provided valuable feedback and raised JIRA issues along the way. We are looking forward to watching the community grow even more now that we have a GA release. Be sure to checkout the recently announced RabbitMQ service on Cloud Foundry along with this tutorial and this blog that show how to use Spring AMQP within your cloud applications. For those of you using the Spring Integration AMQP adapters, we will be releasing the first milestone of Spring Integration 2.1 that includes those adapters within the next few days. We have added a brand new sample demonstrating those adapters. Cheers! the Spring AMQP team [Less]

Virgo 3.0 and Gemini Web 2.0, collectively known as the Maya release, are available for download and download, respectively. The theme of Virgo 3.0 is better integration with EclipseRT technologies. To that end, we have created a Jetty variant of the ... [More] Virgo web server and have switched from Felix to Equinox implementations of some OSGi services. Integration with p2 is proving a tough nut to crack and is deferred to the Bondi (3.5) release, although we expect to issue a milestone soon to get some feedback from the user community. Gemini Web and the Tomcat variant of the Virgo web server have been upgraded to Tomcat 7 and Servlet 3.0. Gemini Web 2.0 passes the OSGi Web Applications compliance tests and will replace the SpringSource OSGi Web Container as the OSGi Web Applications reference implementation. The snaps framework for modular web applications is also released as part of Maya. This started life as the SpringSource slices prototype. Virgo kernel 3.0 has a new shell based on Apache Felix Gogo for both the kernel and user region and accessible via telnet or ssh. The 3.0 kernel also uses a new implementation of regions, the region digraph, based on OSGi standard framework hooks. The digraph should position Virgo well for implementing the OSGi Subsystems specification in a future release. (The specification is still under development, but we expect a public draft from the OSGi Alliance before long.) The digraph has moved from Virgo to Equinox to enable it to be used by other projects, especially those that are aiming to implement the Subsystems spec. Highlights: New Virgo Jetty Server Virgo Tomcat Server and Gemini Web upgraded to Tomcat 7 and Servlet 3.0 New Snaps framework for modular web applications with new guide New Gogo shell New user guide for Gemini Web Updated GreenPages sample with new guide See the release notes for details. [Less]

Josh Long's and Steve Mayzak's book, Getting Started with Roo provides an excellent, thorough, and fun introduction to using Spring Roo, with lots of great examples and tips. You can also purchase it as a print-on-demand book or in alternative formats from the O'Reilly web site.

Today the VMware team released Micro Cloud Foundry, a complete, local version of the popular, open source Platform as a Service that lets developers run a full featured cloud on their Mac or PC. Using Micro Cloud Foundry developers can build ... [More] end-to-end cloud applications locally, without the hassles of configuring middleware while preserving the choice of where to deploy and the ability to scale their applications without changing a line of code. Micro Cloud Foundry is available as a free downloadable virtual machine image and is compatible with VMware Fusion for Mac OS X and VMware Workstation and VMware Player (available as a free download) for Linux and Windows computers. It provides easy installation, setup, and virtual machine management and all you need is a Cloud Foundry account to get started. Josh Long has created a getting started guide for Spring developers and produced a simple video tutorial. 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]

Dear Spring Community, I am happy to announce a new milestone release 2.7.0.M4 of the Cloud Foundry Integration for the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). This milestone release includes support for the just released Micro Cloud Foundry and allows you to ... [More] register users directly from within your IDE. In addition to that the milestone includes a number of fixes and improvements to existing features. Installation instructions and a quick guide for the tooling is available from the SpringSource Team Blog: Using Cloud Foundry from STS. [Less]

Welcome to another edition of "This Week in Spring" Things are moving fast and furious as we near next week's VMworld 2011. I want to invite any attendees to visit your expert technologists at the VMWorld Spring booth. Let me know if you read ... [More] this weekly roundup. Lots to talk about this week, so let's get to it! The preliminary session schedule has been published for SpringOne 2GX 2011. This year's show is going to be another fantastic mix of deep technical content, cutting edge development and the absolute best place to learn about everything in the Spring universe. Be sure to register now! Spring 3.0.6's was just released! This release addresses over 50 minor issues and includes about a dozen small improvements. Be sure to read the Change Log for all the details and download the bits as soon as possible. Spring Data Graph 1.1.0 with Neo4j support has just been released. The new version features improved support for the latest and greatest Neo4j iteration, (1.4.1), as well as improved support for queries. You can now build repositories using Spring Data Graph with much greater ease. Also, the project's been renamed to reflect its core focus, Neo4j, thus, this will be the Spring Data Neo4j project, going forward. This rename is already evident in the packages in the project. Eclipse Gemini Blueprint lead Costin Leau chimes in to note that Eclipse Gemini Blueprint 1.0.0.RELEASE has just been released! The 1.0.0.RELEASE completes the migration of Spring DM to the Eclipse Foundation (see this guide for more information). Nice job, guys! I like CloudFoundry. Others may not be using CloudFoundry, as it is relatively new. Some might still be using Google App Engine, for example. And that's OK. Spring always has been, and will continue to be, about portability and choice. So it is great to see a post that demonstrates it is easy to get Spring Roo applications running on Google App Engine, too! The Spring Integration repository has changed addresses! Formerly, the repository was hosted on git.SpringSource.org, but it is now hosted under the SpringSource Github.com presence. Ken Rimple has another great post, this time on the upcoming Spring Roo 1.2 release, which features support for both the ActiveRecord-style entities that Roo has traditionally generated as well as services, which many will no doubt be familiar with. While it's always been possible to use services in conjunction with Spring Roo, this new release makes it a natural part of the workflow. Agile developer Tarun Sapra, at Xebia India, has written a nice post on the golden rule of when to use to Spring's singleton concept: only use singletons for beans that don't have to have client-specific state. While he poses the golden rule slightly differently, I think the distinction is important. Spring beans can themselves maintain state, but they must guard that state from mutations by multiple (and often concurrent) clients. A lot of times, too, Spring lets you work as though you have client-specific state, but are in fact using a singleton. An example of this is in the way Spring supports injection of the JPA EntityManager, which is not thread-safe. Spring intercepts calls to the EntityManager proxy that's injected and then, in a thread-local, creates an EntityManager so that each request effectively has client-specific state, but they can program in terms of single-threaded access. That said, this post is a very good read. TomcatExpert.com comments on the support for explicit release of JNDI resources in Apache Tomcat. Apache Tomcat 7 contains a number of new features around database connection pooling, which help administrators keep their application available and serving content, collecting customer information, and supporting their applications. The main one that has garnered a lot of attention is the new JDBC Connection Pool feature introduced by Filip Hanik last year. Another connection pool attribute not yet discussed here on TomcatExpert.com is the new closeMethod for speeding up the closing of JNDI resources that would otherwise be closed during garbage collection. This post by Deepak Vohra on IBM's DeveloperWorks has some great information on using Spring Android's RestTemplate support to consume RESTful web services (which, in this example, were developed using JAX-RS). Interoperability is king, and Spring's REST support makes it easy. This fantastic post covers using FreeMarker (via the org.springframework.web.servlet.view.freemarker.FreeMarkerViewResolver view resolver) for Spring MVC views. I like FreeMarker, and it has a lot to offer compared to straight JSP (and even compared to straight JSPX!) The take away, for me, is that Spring MVC supports lots of options, and provides SPIs that make it very simple to integrate new technology for each of the core pieces of the integration. Great stuff! ...which brings me to this implementation of a Spring MVC view by a Sean Scanlon, supporting Mustache.js templates. Great stuff, too! Blogger Mkyong has posted a tutorial introducing how to use Spring Security 3. The tutorial covers the basics of setting up Spring Security 3 with Maven 3 for a simple web application login scenario. Apache Tomcat 6.0.33 has been released! Apache Tomcat 6.0.33 is primarily a security and bug fix release. All users of older versions of the Tomcat 6.0 family should upgrade to 6.0.33. Note that is version has 4 zip binaries: a generic one and three bundled with Tomcat native binaries for different CPU architectures. Apache Tomcat 6.0 includes new features over Apache Tomcat 5.5, including support for the new Servlet 2.5 and JSP 2.1 specifications, a refactored clustering implementation, advanced IO features, and improvements in memory usage. [Less]

With so much of the focus on the new features in Spring 3.1, it is important to remember that the 3.0.x branch is still being updated. Sneaking in under the radar last week, we saw the release of Spring 3.0.6. This release addresses over 50 minor ... [More] issues and includes about a dozen small improvements. Be sure to read the Change Log for all the details. Download | Documentation | Javadoc API | Change Log | JIRA Don't forget that Spring users can ask questions in the community forum and identify issues in JIRA as well. [Less]

Dear Spring community, I'm pleased to announce that the first official release for Eclipse Gemini Blueprint (based on Spring Dynamic Modules for OSGi(tm) Service Platforms) is available for download. Downloads | Docs | Migration Guide The release ... [More] includes various bug-fixes reported since the 1.0.0 RC1 and extended documentation. The 1.0.0.RELEASE completes the migration of Spring DM to the Eclipse Foundation (see this guide for more information). Cheers, Costin Leau Lead, Eclipse Gemini Blueprint [Less]

Dear Spring Community, We are pleased to announce that the second release (1.1.0.RELEASE) of the Spring Data Graph project with Neo4j support is now available! After the first public release of Spring Data Graph in April 2011 we mainly focused on ... [More] user feedback. With the improved documentation around the tooling and an upgraded AspectJ version we addressed many of the AspectJ issues that where reported by users. With the latest STS and Eclipse and hopefully with Idea11 it is possible to develop Spring Data Graph applications without the red wiggles. To further ease the development we also provided sample build scripts for ant/ivy and a plugin for gradle. Of course we kept pace with development of Neo4j, currently using the latest stable release of Neo4j (1.4.1). During the last months of Neo4j development the improved querying (Cypher, Gremlin) support was one of the important aspects. So we strove to support it on all levels. Now, it is possible to execute Cypher queries from Spring Data Graph Repositories, from the Neo4j-Template but also as part of dynamic field annotations and via the introduced entity methods. The same goes for Gremlin scripts. What's possible with this new expressive power? Let's take a look. For example, in a repository: public interface PersonRepository extends GraphRepository, NamedIndexRepository { @Query("start team=(%team) match (team)-[:persons]->(member) return member") Iterable findAllTeamMembers(@Param("team") Group team); @Query(value = "g.v(team).out('persons')", type = QueryType.Gremlin) Iterable findAllTeamMembersGremlin(@Param("team") Group team); } The Neo4j Template API got a complete overhaul which resulted in much fewer, more focused methods. The advanced query result handling capabilities (type conversion, mapping, single results, handler, etc.) are now implemented using a more fluent API. This new API is available for all types of queries, whether index lookups, graph traversals, Cypher queries or Gremlin scripts. template.query("start n=(0) match n-->m return m", null).to(Node.class); template.execute("g.v(0).out", null).to(Node.class); template.lookup("relationship", "name", "rel1").to(String.class, new PropertyContainerNameConverter()).single(); template.traverse(referenceNode, traversalDescription).handle(new Handler() { public void handle(Path value) { final String name = (String) value.endNode().getProperty("name", ""); resultSet.add(name); }}); The REST API wrapper also got an internal refreshment and added support for querying Cypher and Gremlin remotely. This makes both capabilities also available for running the object graph mapping and the Neo4j Template against a remote Neo4j-REST-Server. Many thanks to the community for the valueable feedback, the code contributions and discussions. The collaboration between the SpringSource and Neo-Technology teams was enjoyable, as always. Please check out the current release from Maven Central or from SpringSource.org. If you would like to discuss the Spring Data Graph project, make sure to visit the Spring Forums. We host the project publicly on github for you to fork, comment and contribute. We want to give you a few glimpses of the future roadmap. We are going to host a webinar on Sept. 8th to give a quick intro to Spring Data Graph. Spring Data Graph will be rebranded to "Spring Data Neo4j" as this is what it is about: "Support for the Neo4j Graph Database in a Spring Framework environment." This already cast its first signs in the changed package structures. We will focus on an additional mapping-based implementation that also works without AspectJ. Another major focus will be the remote REST-API which becomes more and more important with the availability of hosted Neo4j services at PaaS providers. The Spring Data Graph Guide Book will be published as InfoQ Mini Book and available as printed version at the Spring One conference in October. Neo Technology will be present at Spring One to talk about NOSQL, Graph Databases and Spring Data Neo4j. We also hope to contribute some unexpected events and technologies to the conference. So stay tuned. Michael Hunger Project Lead, Spring Data Neo4j Project resources: Downloads | JavaDocs | Spring Data Graph Guide Book | Changelog [Less]