Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week we're at OSCON in beautiful Portland, OR! It's been a crazy busy week, and only figures to be busier! It's been nice visiting with colleagues and community members alike. The booth on the expo floor has been flooded with users. I love this show. :)

1. First, the big news: the Spring framework 4.1 release candidate is now available! The new release features updated JSR-107 support, JMS 2.0 and annotation-centric JMS configuration, a SpEL compiler, and so much more.

• Spring XD co-lead Dr. Mark Pollack has just announced that Spring XD RC1 is now available. Installation is dead-simple. There are numerous new features, and this train's moving fast so check it out, download the bits, kick the tires, etc.
• Spring Data ninja Christoph Strobl put together a nice blog post introducing Spring Data MongoDB's full-text search
• The A Piece of My Code blog looks at how to use Spring's integration testing with mock services.
• Tousif Khan has put together a nice post on Spring's view controllers
• The Tech Zoo blog wrote up how to use Spring's Apache Tiles support
• The softwarecave blog introduces how to handle …

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's been a crazy week and next week figures to be even crazier! Some of us on the Spring team - including Spring Boot co-lead Phill Webb, Spring Batch lead Michael Minella and myself, will be at OSCON next week, so if you're in the area and at the show come say hi! We'll be at the booth at various hours, too.

1. Spring Batch lead Michael Minella has just announced Spring Batch 3.0.1, and a new Spring Batch extensions repository which itself houses new integrations with Spring Batch. The first contribution is an ItemReader and ItemWriter for Elasticsearch. Nice!
2. Spring Data ninja Thomas Darimont has just announced support for SpEL in Spring Data JPA @Query annotations
3. Spring and Groovy Tool Suite lead Martin Lippert has just announced Spring Tool Suite 3.6.0 and Groovy Tool Suite 3.6.0, based on Eclipse Luna 4.4, with support for Groovy 2.3, Grails 2.4, tc Server 2.9.6, and other minor improvements and bugfixes.
4. Spring Data ninja Christoph Strobl has just announced Spring Data Evans m1, in which many new revisions are included.
5. Speaking of the first milestone of Spring Data Evans, Spring Data REST ninja Greg Turnquist has just announced that Spring Data Evans M1 milestone comes with ALPS metadata support. FTA: ALPS provides a way to interrogate a RESTful service to find out about the data it serves. Let's look at a quick example. If you clone the TODO repo and run mvn spring-boot:run, you can surf it's values pretty easily. So.. check it out! I know many have been asking about simialar support.
6. Check out this upcoming webinar by Michael Plod on why he recommends Spring - learn the technology (and a bit of the business) case! Michael is a great speaker and frequently appears at conferences. Register now for the event on July 22nd.
7. On July 29th, Russ Danner from Crafter software will tell us about Conquering Content-enabled Web and Mobile Applications with Spring and Groovy.
8. Andreas Eisele has put together a very nice introduction to the machinery behind using @Transactional in your Spring-managed unit-tests, with analysis of common scenarios, code, and more. Vert cool discussion, and a thoughtful post.
9. The Cegega blog has a very cool look at handling exceptions using Spring Batch's RetryTemplate.
10. This subject's near and dear to my hear this week, so I just wanted to share this oldie-but-a-goodie: how to use Atomikos with Spring's JTA support
11. You are, of course, checking out Groovy-language lead Guillaume LaForge's This Week in Groovy, aren't you? :-)

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! I hope our American readers had a pleasant 4th of July, and I hope everybody else had a pleasant Friday!

There is, as usual, a lot to discuss this week so let's get to it!

1. Sleepless Spring Security lead Rob Winch has just announced the first milestone of Spring Session. Spring Session makes it easy to access a session from any environment (i.e. web, messaging infrastructure, etc), support for clustering in a vendor neutral way, plug in strategies for determining the session ID, and easily keep the HttpSession alive when a WebSocket is active. This is really cool! And, in fact, it might solve an issue I faced just last week where I wanted to access the HTTP session from a Web Socket handler!
2. Andy Wilkinson has just announced Spring Boot 1.1.4 release. The new release includes many bug-fixes and small new features, including support for the first stable preview release of Tomcat 8.
3. Andy also just announced the first maintenance release to Spring IO which updates versions across the platform to include Spring AMQP 1.3.5, Spring Boot 1.1.4, Spring Batch 3.0.1, Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.0.1, and Spring Framework 4.0.6. Nice job, Andy!
4. Thomas Risberg has just announced Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.0.1 which revs the dependency versions, including Hadoop 2.4.1, Spring framework 4.0.6.RELEASE, Spring Batch to 3.0.1.RELEASE, Spring Boot to 1.1.4.RELEASE.
5. Stéphane Nicoll has just announced that Spring framework 4.0.6 is now available. This release includes about 50 bugfixes.
6. Spring Social lead Craig Walls has just announced that Spring Social Facebook 2.0.0.M1 is now available. This release supports the new Facebook v2.0.0 Graph API, which introduces some breaking, obligatory, changes (thanks, Facebook!).
7. Groovy project lead Guillaume LaForge has announced the beta of the new Groovy website and is soliciting feedback from the community at large.
8. From the trenches: Join Casey Doolittle and Phil Dutson on July 15th for a webinar about a crazy project, and how they had to Build a Shopping Cart in 24 Hours using Spring.
9. Check out this upcoming webinar by Michael Plod on why he recommends Spring - learn the technology (and a bit of the business) case! Michael is a great speaker and frequently appears at conferences. Register now for the event on July 22nd.
10. On July 29th, Russ Danner from Crafter software will tell us about Conquering Content-enabled Web and Mobile Applications with Spring and Groovy.
11. Last year, Spring tool ninjas Andy Clement and Martin Lippert did a great talk at SpringOne2GX 2013 introducing the latest and greatest tooling.
12. Last year at SpringOne2GX 2013, Julien Dubois (you might recognise him from JHipster..) did a great talk looking at how to run and performance tune the classic Spring petclinic application.
13. Dr. Dobb's had a nice post looking at the new Spring IO release.
14. InfoQ's Matt Raible also put together a nice look at Spring IO. Check it out!
15. The Literate Java blog has an interesting post on implicit (component-scan-centric) vs. explicit configuration (using XML) in Spring. I'd argue that Java configuration should really be considered as it offers the best of both explicit XML configuration (centralized, easy-to-reason about configuration) and implicit, but type-safe, Java annotation-and-component-scann-centric configuration. Either way, interesting post!
16. Spring Boot is now in Thoughtwork's technology radar under assess.
17. The Codeleak.pl site has a nice look at one of the smaller, but super powerful, features in Spring 4 - CGLIB proxies no longer require a default constructor!
18. I've enjoyed this series of tutorials on using Spring and Angular.js. You might as well. Nice job, Christopher Henkel!
19. The Apprenticeship Notes blog has a nice series of tutorials on how to use Spring MVC, Thymeleaf, and Bootstrap together.
20. The Autoletics blog has a nice, numbers-filled, look at their experience profiling the Reactor project. Interesting stuff! Some of the points are interesting, too. As readers of this roundup know, Reactor is a highly concurrent event-driven IO-ready platform. And, it's ridiculously fast.
21. I wanted to give a hat tip to Paul Snively, who has been using the 1-2 punch combo of the Spring (and Scala) and a third-party integration of Spring MVC for Alfresco to build Alfresco-powered solutions. Nice!
22. Whether you like the new Groovy website or not (although, why wouldn't you?), you'll love the new Groovy 2.3.4 release which just dropped today and includes improvements on static compilation and AST transformations.
23. HornetQ project-lead Clebert Suconic is inviting community feedback about a proposed contribution of HornetQ to the Apache ActiveMQ project. We know that developers in our community know and use both, so perhaps now's a prudent time to feedback if this proposed merger affects you! I personally like the idea. ActiveMQ.next (long codenamed "Apollo") seems like it could use the hug that a HornetQ-contribution could give it. And, of course, Spring Boot supports both ActiveMQ and HornetQ now, so either way, you're set!

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's already July, and Summer is here! Can you believe it? Time sure flies. We've got a lot to cover this week, as usual, so let's get to it.

1. Last week, we announced the Spring IO platform. I won the lottery on this one, and they let me write the blog, but this effort reflects more than a year of internal discussion, planning, hard work, cooperation and coordination between all the Spring projects. I did my level-headed best to introduce the Spring IO platform in this blog. You should read it. If it doesn't sound awesome and very, very useful, than I've simply done a poor job explaining it! :D Don't hesitate to reach out. The Spring IO platform is a radically simpler way of dealing with dependencies across all the Spring…

We're pleased to announce the release of Spring IO 1.0!

Spring IO is first and foremost a logical description of what many of users will already know and use as a single, cohesive, harmonized platform, centered around Spring.

Big Things Come in Small (Java) Packages

The Spring IO platform includes Foundation Layer modules and Execution Layer domain-specific runtimes (DSRs). The Foundation Layer represents the core Spring modules and associated third-party dependencies that have been harmonized to ensure a smooth development experience. The DSRs provided by the Spring IO Execution Layer…

We're pleased to announce the release of Spring IO Platform 1.0.0 RELEASE, and represents some amazing engineering work. The highlights of this release are:

• A Bill-of-Materials release (a Maven BOM dependency) that level sets the versions for you.
• Spring IO represents curated and harmonized dependencies that just work together - tests cover all the Spring projects and lots of popular 3rd party open source
• One platform, many workloads - build web (HTML-, websocket-, and REST-powered web apps), mobile, integration, batch, reactive or big data applications, or just great APIs
• Radically simplified development experience with Spring Boot
• Production-ready features provided out of the box (monitoring, metrics, etc)
• …

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring - this week I'm working with the amazing Vaadin team on building some ridiculously fun applications. Be ready for more on that soon! Also, the SpringOne2GX 2014 early bird has been extended to June 30th, so register now! Without further ado, onward:

• Spring Boot 1.1.2 is now available! The new release features mainly bug fixes and more. Check it out!

• Adib Saikali gave a nice talk introducing where the rest of the Spring IO platform benefits from Java 8, above and beyond the uses we've previously described in Spring framework.

• Check out this replay of Spring Batch lead Michael Minella's webinar introducing Spring Batch 3.0

• Check out Glenn Renfro's introduction to using Spring Integration in an internet-of-things world

• Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke has announced the final service release for Spring Data Codd. This release contains bug-fixes that were already in the RC and GA releases of the Dijkstra release train.

  …

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring. This week I'm in Toronto, Canada, visiting the Pivotal Labs offices and talking to customers doing amazing things with different parts of the Spring platform.

There is some very exciting news coming tomorrow, so be sure to check this blog tomorrow!

1. Spring for Hadoop 2.0 GA has been released! The new release adds support for Apache Hadoop (2.2, 2.4), Pivotal HD 2.0, Cloudera CDH 5, and Hortonworks HDP 2.1, supports YARN, new readers/writers for working with HDFS, new support for reading and writing POJO datasets using the Kite SDK, and a lot more.
2. Spring YARN ninja Janne Valkealahti has put together some epic guides introducing Spring YARN. Related: there are Canadian banks interested in this stuff! BANKS - the most risk averse organizations in the world!
3. Stéphane Nicoll talks about the improvements in our Spring Cache abstraction coming in Spring 4.1.
4. Stéphane also debuts the new Getting Started guide that introduces the Spring Cache abstraction. Very cool!
5. Join Greg Turnquist on July 8th for a webinar about Building your app management tools with Spring Boot. See how to monitor application logs using a little Spring Integration, Spring WebSocket+STOMP, and other technologies, all with some lightweight Boot+Groovy code.
6. From the trenches: Join Casey Doolittle and Phil Dutson on July 15th for a webinar about a crazy prioject, and how they had to Build a Shopping Cart in 24 Hours using Spring.
7. Check out this upcoming webinar by Michael Plod on why he recommends Spring - learn the business and technology case! Michael is a great speaker and frequently appears at conferences. Register now for the event on July 22nd.
8. On July 29th, Russ Danner from Crafter software will tell us about Conquering Content-enabled Web and Mobile Applications with Spring and Groovy.
9. SpringOne2GX 2013 replay from Splunk: Integrating Splunk into your Spring Applications
10. SpringOne2GX 2013 replay from JFrog: Open/Closed Software - Developing freemium application using Spring Framework
11. Kailashnath Kutti talks about scripting and and querying Hadoop at the Singapore Spring User Group. Nice talk, check it out!
12. Speaking of Hadoop, check out this article on GigaOm about the state of the Hadoop ecosystem, and of Pivotal's contributions
13. I liked Rafał Nowak's introduction to Spring Boot.
14. There's a nice post on Dzone by Lubos Krnac on secure-by-default vs. secure-by-exception approaches to using Spring Security. I like it! The nice thing about Spring Security is that the choice is always yours.
15. Sezin Karli put together a nice post on how to use Spring Boot's auto configuration support for Spring Social
16. I loved Netflix engineer Tomas Lin's great post on reading and validating lists of properties with Spring Boot.
17. Congrats to team Socrates on winning the Neo4j prize at HackSummit for most innovative use of a graph Database for social good. Does this have much to do with Spring? No, it's just that Neo4j's a very nice choice for many different types of data workloads. You might check out the webinar the amazing Michael Hunger and I did on the topic a little while ago!
18. An oldie but a goodie: Keyhole software's Mark Adelsberger put together a nice post on how they use Spring's RabbitMQ support, following a tutorial on the same subject.

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. This week has been an amazing week! I started it in Krakow, Poland, talking to developers at the wonderful 33rd Degree conference, then headed to Warsaw, Poland, where I presented at the amazing local Spring Labs user group. Tomorrow, it's off to London for Devoxx UK where I'll be helping spread the Spring Boot awesome. Then, Friday, it's off to Toronto where I'll be meeting with 4 customers and teams using Spring next week. What's this mean for you? Well, for one, if you're in London and Toronto, say hi! It also means that conference season is on in full force. We try to be wherever we're needed. What conferences (besides SpringOne2GX 2014, of course!) are you going to this year? I'd love to know which conferences you're doing this year. Help us prioritize, please. Thanks! (Twitter hashtag #twiSpring)

• Spring Boot 1.1's been released! It includes new support for GSP, Spring Social, Velocity, Freemarker, Spring Mobile, Spring HATEOAS, and much, much, more. LOTS of new autoconfiguration support too: GemFire, HornetQ, Elasticsearch, Solr, Spring Social, Spring Integration, Spring Mobile and Spring HATEOAS. Honestly, you might just be better off reading the blog and coming back. There's so much awesome there.
• Our CFSummit conference is being held right now in San Francisco! There's lots of amazing stuff around Cloud Foundry. I found more than a few press announcements, but here's one from eWeek on some of the new stuff in PCF 1.3.
• If you are not the the CloudFoundry Summit in San Francisco this week, you may have missed Matt Stine's amazing talk: Cloud Foundry and Microservices: A Mutualistic Symbiotic Relationship. You heard it here first: CloudFoundry and Spring Boot are going to make a killer combination for Microservices.
• In celebration of the Spring Boot release, the amazing Greg Turnquist is presenting Building your app management tools with Spring Boot on July 8th.
• Join Glenn Renfro as he takes you through Spring Integration 4.0's Boot/JavaConfig/Annotation driven experience in Spring Integration Done Boot-ifully on June 17th.
• Casey Doolittle and Phil Dutson present the ultimate e-commerce feature fire drill: Building a Shopping Cart in 24 Hours using Spring on July 15th
• Check out this replay of the talk from last year's SpringOne2GX 2013, SpringOne2GX 2013 Replay: Space Exploration: APIs for Secure Interconnected HTML5 Applications with Sencha Space
• The amazing Craig Walls gave a great talk on Spring Social last year at SpringOne2GX 2013, check it out! Spring Social 1.1 just dropped, after all. Now's a good time to catch up and get connected to the services your customers are.
• Greg Turnquist published a very nice blog on the process of contributing a Spring IO guide. Greg's also one of the main contributors to the guides, so if he approves, then you know it's good. Rock on, open source!
• Speaking of that new guide, you should check it out: it's about how to get started building a SOAP service with Spring WS. (Hey, it's still a thing for a lot of people, and Spring WS's new Java configuration-based endpoint model is very well suited to the task!)
• Ramnivas Laddad, one of the brains behind AspectJ, one of the architects behind Cloud Foundry, and our local cloud ninja, recently did a webinar on Spring Cloud, which makes it easy to consume PaaS-bound services in a clean, dependency-injection centric way: check it out!
• Manuel Jordan, an amazing member of our community (editor on a few of my books, winner of the Springy Award for his amazing contributions on the forum where he answered more questions than anyone, and all around nice guy) in Arequipa, Peru, put together an epic series of blogs introducing various parts of Spring. Check them out. Great job, Manuel!
• The softwarecave blog has a post on using Hibernate with Spring. I dig it, but would remind people that there's little to no reason to use XML anymore, and - even if there were a reason, there's little to no reason to write this sort of configuration anymore, at all. Just use Spring Boot. It's amazing what a difference an @EnableAutoConfiguration makes!
• The GeekAByte blog has a nice post on the various types of annotation-centric autowiring possible with Spring. Check it out!

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. This week's an exciting week! Well, let's be honest. They're all exciting weeks. But in particular, this week's going to make a lot of people happy. Watch the blog and I'll see you back here next week to recap! :)

1. Oh my goodness! Spring Boot 1.1.0.RC1 is now available! The new release maintains the epic with support for Spring Data Elasticsearch, HornetQ, and Spring Social, and a lot more! Grab the latest release, kick the tires, and feedback on Twitter or GitHub.
2. Dr. Mark Pollack has just announced that the latest release of Spring XD, 1.0.0.M7 is now available. The new release provides a lot of great new features. My favorite is the ability to pin data to a certain stream - think of this as correllation using a message's content - so that you can preserve stateful operations. Think of this as a great way to route and divide messages based on a useful business key. There's a great example in the release notes.
3. Azul rockstar Gil Tene gave an amazing talk on reducing latency for SpringOne2gX 2013 that is now available online. Gil is one of our industry's mad scientists. I haven't yet seen this talk, but I will, and I highly recommend that you do too. Azul makes high performance, low latency JVMs both as appliances and as deliverable software. His talks thus stem from a lot of thankless research and development that I'd just as soon spare myself by watching, and learning from, his talks. Go, Gil!
4. June webinars are here! Michael Minella in Spring Batch 3.0.0 on June 10th, and Glenn Renfro in Spring Integration Done Boot-ifully on June 17th.
5. Spring ninja Greg Turnquist has put together a teaser post on using the amazing when.js Promises/A+ implementation in a front-end REST client in advance of his SpringOne2GX 2014 talk. Check out the post and his talk at the conference!
6. Ramnivas Laddad, a Spring ninja, original AspectJ leaders, and architects behind Cloud Foundry, has just posted a very cool look at Spring Cloud, which makes consuming client services from different middle/infrastructure services (a database, a message queue) on various Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaSes) a simple matter of platform-decoupling configuration.
7. The replay of ADP's Jeffery Sologov's talk looking at the pitfalls of building large scale applications is now up! Check it out!
8. ttp://twitter.com/JakubJirutka chimed in to tell us about this epic Spring Expression Language (SpEL)-powered implementation of the Bean Validation API (JSR 303/349). The GitHub offers an interesting point, "it’s especially very useful for cross-field validations that are very complicated with a plain Bean Validation." I love the examples, too:

    
   @SpELAssert(value = "password.equals(passwordVerify)",
           applyIf = "password || passwordVerify",
           message = "{validator.passwords_not_same}")
   public class User {
     private String password;
     private String passwordVerify;
   }
   

   Nice job!

9. A hat tip to the amazing Brian Dussault for finding this: Zuul is a nifty looking application configuration management solution that offers a clean Spring client API.

10. You know what made my day yesterday? A HystrixInvocationHandler. An InvocationHandler is used by the JDK (and Spring's rich proxying subsystem) to create proxies that wrap beans. This InvocationHandler wraps method invocations on a given bean in Netflix's OSS Hystrix project's Command objects. Hystrix Commands wrap functionality and provide/support resiliency patterns. I can't wait to see more of what becomes of Spencer Gibb's Halfpipe project!
11. Our pal David Welch is at it again, this time with an interesting project called Spring Tiered, which aims to simplify even further (and normalize) the development of HATEOAS based services. Interesting...
12. Also, speaking of building (and consuming) resilient services, check out Chris Richardson's fantastic talk from SpringOne2GX 2013 on powerful abstractions for consuming services asynchronously.
13. Also, I put together a post talking about getting started with Maven (and alternatives) and Spring