Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week, I'm off to Paris, France for Devoxx France. Many of us on the Spring and Cloud Foundry teams will be there, so don't hesitate to reach out if you're about, we'd love to hear from you! Also, even if you're not at the show, come meet many of us on the Spring team (including Juergen Hoeller himself, Stéphane Nicoll, Brian Clozel, Sébastien Deleuze and of course yours truly) at this free Devoxx France event.

Also, this Thursday I'll be speaking at the vJUG again, this time on building microservices with Spring Cloud. Don't miss it!

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it!

• Spring Security lead Rob Winch just announced the amazing Spring Security 4.0 release! This one is packed with amazing features including websocket support, Spring Data integration, enhanced testing support, and much improved defaults
• The Cloud Foundry Java buildpack now supports overriding inbuilt configuration through the use of well-named environment variables! This means you can tweak all manner of the default behavior without needing to fork the buildpack!
• Good news! Spring XD 1.1.1 is released! It includes improved performance and offset management when using Kafka message bus, support for Spark's streaming reliable receiver, Kryo serialization improvements, RabbitMQ auto-cleanup options and a Sqoop…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week, I'm in São Paulo, Brazil, where I presented a workshop on building cloud-native applications - specifically microservices - with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud and Cloud Foundry (via Pivotal Web Services).

• Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke has just announced Spring Data Fowler has gone GA, packed with lots of advanced Java 8 features, as well!
• The agenda for the Spring IO show in Barcelona, Spain is now available! Check it out!
• Done with the microservices hype? Then let's get practical on April 21st. I'll be talking about how Spring Cloud integrates service registration (e.g.: Eureka, Consul, or Zookeeper), declarative REST clients (with Netflix's Feign), reactive programming and the circuit breaker pattern with Hystrix to support easy, robust service-to-service invocations.
• Marius Bogoevici and Mark Pollack are teaming up for a webinar on Tues April 28th about Reactive data-pipelines with Spring XD and Kafka…

This week I'm in São Paulo, Brazil presenting at QCon SP. I had an interesting discussion with someone who loves Spring's REST stack, but wondered if there was something more efficient than plain-ol' JSON. Indeed, there is! I often get asked about Spring's support for high-speed binary based encoding of messages. Spring's long supported RPC encoding with the likes of Hessian, Burlap, etc., and Spring Framework 4.1 introduced support for Google Protocol Buffers which can be used with REST services as well.

From the Google Protocol Buffer website:

Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages...

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Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I've been busily preparin for a workshop I'll be giving at QCon São Paulo next week. If you're at the show, I hope you'll come out to say hi, ask questions and we'll talk Spring and Cloud Foundry. Obrigado!

1. The replay on my humble webinar introducing Spring Session is online, check it out!
2. Janne Valkealahti has just announced the latest release of Spring Security Kerberos 1.0.0.RC1, packed with new features and now - at long last!! - near GA! Go Janne and team, go!
3. Spring and Groovy & Grails Tool Suite lead Martin Lippert just announced STS and GGTS 3.6.4.
4. I put together a post on getting started with Spring Data Couchbase
5. Spring XD ninjas Marius Bogoevici and Dr. Mark Pollack are going to be giving a webinar on April 28th that introduces using Spring XD and Apache Kafka…

This blog was inspired by a talk that Laurent Doguin, a developer advocate over at Couchbase, and I gave at Couchbase Connect last year. Merci Laurent!

This is a demo of the Spring Data Couchbase integration. From the project page, Spring Data Couchbase is:

The Spring Data Couchbase project provides integration with the Couchbase Server database. Key functional areas of Spring Data Couchbase are a POJO centric model for interacting with Couchbase Buckets and easily writing a Repository style data access layer.

What is Couchbase?

Couchbase is a distributed data-store that enjoys true horizontal scaling. I like to think of it as a mix of Redis and MongoDB: you work with documents that are accessed through their keys. There are numerous client APIs for all languages. If you're using Couchbase for your backend and using the JVM, you'll love Spring Data Couchbase…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I am at DevNexus in Atlanta, GA along with a handful of Spring team members and Spring community luminaries. I'll be presenting a talk on getting started with Spring Boot and I hope you'll join me, or one of the many other talks on Spring team:

• Spring 4 Web Applications by Rossen Stoyanchev
• Cloud Native Apps with Spring Cloud by Spencer Gibb
• Building microservices with Scala, functional domain models and Spring Boot by Chris Richardson
• What is new in Spring Integration 4? by Marius Bogoevici
• Spring Data REST - Data Meets Hypermedia by Greg Turnquist and Roy Clarkson
• IoT Realized - The Connected Car by Michael Minella
• Keeping It Clean - Lessons learned from Open Source on how to polish code by Phillip Webb
• Spring Integration Java DSL - A Deep Dive by Gary Russell
…

This post is a guest post by Activiti co-founder and community member Joram Barrez (@jbarrez) who works for Alfresco. Thanks Joram! I'd like to see more of these community guest posts, so - as usual - don't hesitate to ping me (@starbuxman) with ideas and contributions! -Josh

Introduction

Activiti is an Apache-licensed business process management (BPM) engine. Such an engine has as core goal to take a process definition comprised of human tasks and service calls and execute those in a certain order, while exposing various API's to start, manage and query data about process instances for…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Kansas City, Kansas, hanging out with my pal and Spring Security lead Rob Winch. This week, I'm speaking at the local User Group and the Spring User Group, and I'll be talking to Cerner and a few other large businesses about Spring, Spring Boot and Spring Cloud.

As usual, we've got a lot of great stuff to talk about, so let's go to it!

1. Spring Boot co-lead Phil Webb just announced Spring Boot 1.2.2 and Spring Boot 1.1.11. Both releases are recommended upgrades, and Spring Boot 1.2.2 even includes new support for the Mustache templating library. Nice!
2. Check out John Hann's SpringOne2GX 2014 talk, introducing Rave.js, which brings Spring Boot-concepts to JavaScript
3. I put together a blog on building applications that use the Servlet HTTP session in a scalable manner and in a portable way - from application server, web server, and cloud - with ease.
4. Chris Beams's SpringOne2GX 2014 talk, The Revolution will not be Centralized…

A Framework for all Seasons (and Architectures)

Spring walks an interesting line. It provides a lot of value no matter where you run it, and - because it's built on dependency injection layer - it offers a natural piece of indirection between the underlying layer and the applications that run on top of it. This indirection promotes code portability through decoupling: your application code is ignorant of where the javax.sql.DataSource (or whatever) handle it's using comes from, be it a JNDI lookup, environment variables, or a simple new'd-up bean provided by Spring. This decoupling and the…