Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! Here in the States we had a 3-day weekend, which was nice. Good chance to watch some of those amazing tech talks! If you're like me, you've run out of tech talks, and will be glad to see that we have a lot more going up today!

1. Grails project lead Graeme Rocher just announced Grails 2.4! The new release is amazing for a slew of reasons, not the least of which is that some of its many amazing features are easy to use with Spring Boot, too. Double win! Congratulations, Graeme and team. (And also thank you, for another amazing release!)
2. Spring Boot 1.1.0.M2 is now available! The new release features improved support for Spring Data Solr, Spring Data Gemfire, and the entire Spring Data Dijkstra release train. The new release also offers GSP (Groovy Server Pages) and Velocity as templating options, along with upgrades to various libraries like Spring Security 3.2.4, and Spring Batch 3.0. This release train is moving quickly, so jump onboard while you can! There's a lot more great stuff, so check out the release notes.
3. June webinars are here! Ramnivas Laddad on launches Spring Cloud on June 3rd in Abstracting PaaS services to be portable with Spring Cloud, Michael Minella in Spring Batch 3.0.0 on June 10th, and Glenn Renfro in Spring Integration Done Boot-ifully on June 17th.
4. This blog introduces some of the limitations of Hibernate's inbuilt JDBC logging and then introduces log4jdbc as used in a simple Spring / Hibernate application.
5. Our pal Eugen Paraschiv has put together a very nice introduction to Spring Data JPA.
6. Matti Tahvonen over on the Vaadin team put together this fantastic introduction to using Spring Data Neo4j, Spring Boot, and of course the Vaadin4Spring library that Petter Holmström and I started. To be fair, it's only usable because of Petter :) So usable, in fact, that Matti was able to put together something beautiful - Bootiful - very quickly. Check it out! The application models (and visualizes!) data stored in Neo4j, so it's not just any old CRUD application, this is very cool!
7. CloudFoundry ninja James Bayer announced the new Pivotal CF 1.2, which now supports VMWare's Hybrid Cloud Service, initial auditing and autoscaling, new data services (Redis, MongoDB, Neo4j, RiakCS, and ElasticSearch are all available!), and a lot more!
8. Curiousity piqued? Want to learn more about CloudFoundry, the open-source Paas from Pivotal? Check out this epic video on how to setup your own Paas using BOSH from SpringOne2GX 2013. And hear about how other teams acutally did it in the SprignOne2GX replay - Free Yourself with CloudFoundry: A Private Cloud Experience.
9. Data ninja Thomas Risberg just announced the new Spring for Apache Hadoop RC4 release, which is awesome! The new release improves upon the Spring YARN integration. YARN, of course, is the distributed, generic runtime on top of which Hadoop 2.0's very specific map/reduce support now sits. You can use YARN for job distribution of your own, however. You might, for example, use YARN to split up Spring Batch workloads. In the new example, Janne Valkealahti demonstrates a simple Spring Boot-powered Spring YARN component. It's amazing how concise this stuff is now!
10. Want to learn more about Janne Valkealahti, the mad (data) scientist behind our Spring YARN support? Check out this Pivotal People profile!
11. Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke does a nice job introducing the new hotness in Spring Data Dijkstra, the new Spring Data umbrella release. This release includes Java 8 Optional support, asynchronous repository method invocations, and more.
12. Spring Security lead Rob Winch has just two small, bugfixe releases: Spring LDAP 2.0.2, and Spring Security 3.2.4
13. Spring Web Services lead Arjen Poutsma has just announced Spring Web Services 2.2.0, which now features a Java configuration API and much more.
14. Let me take a moment to remind everyone: Java configuration is everywhere! Spring framework, Boot, Data, Security, MVC, Integration, Batch, Social, and much more, all offer as-rich-as-the-XML Java configuration integrations. In the case of Boot, Java configuration is the only out-of-the-box option, though of course you can use XML if you'd like. It's just.. not expected.
15. Spring Security lead also blogged about using Spring Security Test to handle web security
16. Want to write your own Spring Boot starter? Check out this example from Spring ninja Stephane Nicoll on how to provide a HornetQ starter for Spring Boot
17. At long last, Spring Social Google 1.0.0.GA has been released! Congratulations, Gabriel, on all the work required to arrive here. I like the easy-to-use example, too.
18. Arnaud Giuliani has put together a very cool look at using GWT with Spring Boot. Nicely done, Arnaud!
19. Netflix engineer Tomas Lin tweeted a link to a convenient Spring MVC exception handler for REST APIs. This is one (fine) way to approach the problem. As an alternative, I'd suggest you take a look at [using Spring HATEOAS' VndError(s) support]a).

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Krakow, Poland for Geecon, the Polish developer conference where, of course, I'll be speaking to developers about Spring. (and, maybe, Spring). If you're around, find me, I'll be wearing the giant Spring leaf t-shirt! :)

Other than that, there's a lot to get through so let's get to it!

• In preparation for the upcoming Spring IO Platform, Spring Data release train Dijkstra has been released! This is a tremendous release train that includes: JPA, MongoDB, Neo4J, Apache Solr, Couchbase, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Gemfire, Redis and Data REST! Congrats to the Spring Data Team!
• Spring Boot 1.1.0 M1 is now available and introduces MongoDB and Gemfire support, as well as improved actuator metrics and health endpoints.
• Final maintenance releases for the Spring Framework 3.2.x and 4.0.x versions are now available!
• Spring Integration ninja (rockstar!) Artem Bilan put together a nice post introducing all the amazing Java configuration support in the nascent Spring Integration Java configuration DSL, which builds upon the basic @EnableIntegration support available in the just-released Spring Integration 4.0. You should read that post. Seriously. I want to steal some of Artem's thunder by excerpting this one amazing code-snippet:

  java @Bean IntegrationFlow helloWorldFlow() { return IntegrationFlows.from("helloWorldInput") .filter("World"::equals) .transform("Hello "::concat) .handle(System.out::println) .get(); } Yep! That's a Spring Integration flow that handles input messages, filters them, transforms them, and then gives them to the escape-hatch method, handle, which lets the developer insert any behavior into the mix. Remember, you can change anything about this - including where it gets the messages from and where it writes the messages to. Indeed, the output of one flow could be the input to another. Congratulations, Spring Integration team! Also, make sure to check out the launch webinar replay!

• I know I mentioned this last week, but it's so worth a re-read! Groovy 2.3.0 is here! (Hah! Gotcha! This week's link was to a different post by the same author on the subject of the Groovy 2.3.0 release! But aren't you glad you read it, anyway?) Go, Groovy, go!
• My pal Pieter Humphrey has done a nice introductory screencast on Spring XD - showing how to get up and running doing stream processing, and wiring it to an analytics dashboard in less than 7 minutes. XD uses a deceptively simple DSL (domain specific language) and no Java code - it's never been easier to work with Hadoop.
• Spring Security lead Rob Winch has been moving heaven and earth to make unit-testing secure applications easier than ever. In this first installment of a new series, Rob looks at new annotations designed to stand in place of a live-fire Spring Security apparatus to mock a Principal, a UserDetailsService, and more. Check it out and stay tuned for more!
• Speaking of Rob Winch, he gave an epic introduction to Spring Security at SpringOne2GX 2013 last year. This is a perfect place to jump onboard if you're new to Spring Security.
• New Relic's Ashley Puls was kind enough to do a webinar with your humble author on Web Application Diagnostics using New Relic. Thanks, Ashley! I'll be very honest, this webinar was super informative for me. I knew just a little about New Relic, and in working through the development of the webinar I learned about a zillion and five use cases that are well served by New Relic. Really cool stuff!
• Also published this week - a SpringOne2GX 2013 Replay by Emad Benjamin and Guillermo Tantucho: Virtualizing and Tuning Large Scale Java Platforms. This goes over JVM memory tuning and all the tricks and tips for getting Java to run well on a virtualized environment.
• SpringOne2GX 2013 replay - a great talk from SAS Software: Migrating from WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss to Pivotal tcServer. This might go well with a recent post on why App Servers are dead by Eberhard Wolff.
• Do you love Spring's new home on the web, spring.io, as much as I do? Want to learn more? Check out this talk by project lead and Spring ninja Chris Beams on the makeup of the site, its development, and deployment.
• Last week, Spring Data Neo4j lead and graph-ninja Michael Hunger and I gave a talk on Spring Boot and Neo4j. This talk was fun for me because it gave me a lot of excuses to play with Neo4j. In point of fact, Michael and I are doing a webinar on about the same subject on the 20th of May (that's 7 days away!), so come see what we've come up with. In the meantime, you may want to check out this recent post on creating a time-tree with Cypher, the language that Michael works on that's used to drive interactions with Neo4j. That post was, of course, a response to another post that Michael put together on importing forests into Neo4j, also worth a read!
• I quite liked this post introducing how to setup a Spring Batch job using Spring Boot. The author found a comfortable configuration-middle ground in the Groovy BeanBuilder support, and describes it nicely in this post
• Moritz Schulze has put together a very nice post, following others in the series, on how to integration test REST services
• Are you using Spring Boot and want to use Spock? Netflix engineer Tomas Lin has put together an example on his GitHug page. Check it out!
• Jakub Kubrynski has put together a nice post on how to use Spring Boot's org.springframework.boot.actuate.system.ApplicationPidListener (which Jakub contributed - thanks Jakub!) - to work with the application's process identifier (PID). Nice!
• Meltdown 1.0.0 has been released! Meltdown is a Clojure interface to the Reactor project. So... functional programming and stream processing inside a lisp-like language? A dream! Check it out!

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Krakow, Poland for Geecon, the Polish developer conference where, of course, I'll be speaking to developers about Spring. (and, maybe, Spring). If you're around, find me, I'll be wearing the giant Spring leaf t-shirt! :)

Other than that, there's a lot to get through so let's get to it!

• In preparation for the upcoming Spring IO Platform, Spring Data release train Dijkstra has been released! This is a tremendous release train that includes: JPA, MongoDB, Neo4J, Apache Solr, Couchbase, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Gemfire, Redis and Data REST! Congrats to the Spring Data Team!
• Spring Boot 1.1.0 M1 is now available and introduces MongoDB and Gemfire support, as well as improved actuator metrics and health endpoints.
• Final maintenance releases for the Spring Framework 3.2.x and 4.0.x versions are now available!
• Spring Integration ninja (rockstar!) Artem Bilan put together a nice post introducing all the amazing Java configuration support in the nascent Spring Integration Java configuration DSL, which builds upon the basic @EnableIntegration support available in the just-released Spring Integration 4.0. You should read that post. Seriously. I want to steal some of Artem's thunder by excerpting this one amazing code-snippet:

  java @Bean IntegrationFlow helloWorldFlow() { return IntegrationFlows.from("helloWorldInput") .filter("World"::equals) .transform("Hello "::concat) .handle(System.out::println) .get(); } Yep! That's a Spring Integration flow that handles input messages, filters them, transforms them, and then gives them to the escape-hatch method, handle, which lets the developer insert any behavior into the mix. Remember, you can change anything about this - including where it gets the messages from and where it writes the messages to. Indeed, the output of one flow could be the input to another. Congratulations, Spring Integration team! Also, make sure to check out the launch webinar replay!

• I know I mentioned this last week, but it's so worth a re-read! Groovy 2.3.0 is here! (Hah! Gotcha! This week's link was to a different post by the same author on the subject of the Groovy 2.3.0 release! But aren't you glad you read it, anyway?) Go, Groovy, go!
• My pal Pieter Humphrey has done a nice introductory screencast on Spring XD - showing how to get up and running doing stream processing, and wiring it to an analytics dashboard in less than 7 minutes. XD uses a deceptively simple DSL (domain specific language) and no Java code - it's never been easier to work with Hadoop.
• Spring Security lead Rob Winch has been moving heaven and earth to make unit-testing secure applications easier than ever. In this first installment of a new series, Rob looks at new annotations designed to stand in place of a live-fire Spring Security apparatus to mock a Principal, a UserDetailsService, and more. Check it out and stay tuned for more!
• Speaking of Rob Winch, he gave an epic introduction to Spring Security at SpringOne2GX 2013 last year. This is a perfect place to jump onboard if you're new to Spring Security.
• New Relic's Ashley Puls was kind enough to do a webinar with your humble author on Web Application Diagnostics using New Relic. Thanks, Ashley! I'll be very honest, this webinar was super informative for me. I knew just a little about New Relic, and in working through the development of the webinar I learned about a zillion and five use cases that are well served by New Relic. Really cool stuff!
• Also published this week - a SpringOne2GX 2013 Replay by Emad Benjamin and Guillermo Tantucho: Virtualizing and Tuning Large Scale Java Platforms. This goes over JVM memory tuning and all the tricks and tips for getting Java to run well on a virtualized environment.
• SpringOne2GX 2013 replay - a great talk from SAS Software: Migrating from WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss to Pivotal tcServer. This might go well with a recent post on why App Servers are dead by Eberhard Wolff.
• Do you love Spring's new home on the web, spring.io, as much as I do? Want to learn more? Check out this talk by project lead and Spring ninja Chris Beams on the makeup of the site, its development, and deployment.
• Last week, Spring Data Neo4j lead and graph-ninja Michael Hunger and I gave a talk on Spring Boot and Neo4j. This talk was fun for me because it gave me a lot of excuses to play with Neo4j. In point of fact, Michael and I are doing a webinar on about the same subject on the 20th of May (that's 7 days away!), so come see what we've come up with. In the meantime, you may want to check out this recent post on creating a time-tree with Cypher, the language that Michael works on that's used to drive interactions with Neo4j. That post was, of course, a response to another post that Michael put together on importing forests into Neo4j, also worth a read!
• I quite liked this post introducing how to setup a Spring Batch job using Spring Boot. The author found a comfortable configuration-middle ground in the Groovy BeanBuilder support, and describes it nicely in this post
• Moritz Schulze has put together a very nice post, following others in the series, on how to integration test REST services
• Are you using Spring Boot and want to use Spock? Netflix engineer Tomas Lin has put together an example on his GitHug page. Check it out!
• Jakub Kubrynski has put together a nice post on how to use Spring Boot's org.springframework.boot.actuate.system.ApplicationPidListener (which Jakub contributed - thanks Jakub!) - to work with the application's process identifier (PID). Nice!
• Meltdown 1.0.0 has been released! Meltdown is a Clojure interface to the Reactor project. So... functional programming and stream processing inside a lisp-like language? A dream! Check it out!

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Los Angeles, speaking to large companies who are looking at building their next-generation architectures on top of Spring and Spring Boot, in particular. Oh, I also go to visit the super cool Pivotal Los Angeles office!

• Spring Data Hadoop ninja Thomas Risberg (who, by the way, was one of the original authors on JdbcTemplate, among his many other claims to fame!) has just announced Spring for Hadoop 2.0.RC3. The new release grows the set of supported Hadoop distributions and includes support for YARN, which you can see in action in some of our Getting Started Guides.
• Spring Integration 4.0 is a major upgrade - the new 4.0 release offers full support for Annotations and Java Configuration + some Spring Boot support! With 4.0, you'll be able to make XML - free integration applications. Join project lead Gary Russell taking you through all the new hotness in the webinar, Spring Integration 4.0, the new frontier, on May 13.
• Spring Framework 4.0.4 is a maintenance release with some minor dependency updates, and is recommended. Update the version and mvn clean install/gradle package now!
• The new Spring Data release, Spring Data Dijkstra RC1 (named for Edsger W. Dijkstra), is finally here, and packed full of awesome features! One of my personal favorites is the ability to return Java 8 Optional values in a repository. I put together an example here. The new release train is huge, and includes a few (historically exclusively community-driven) modules like Spring Data Cassandra, Spring Data Solr, and Spring Data Couchbase. Don't miss it!
• The new 3.5.1 release of the Spring and Groovy/Grails Tool Suites are now available. The new releases are packed with new features, updates and a new baseline so check out the release notes.
• Groovy 2.3 is here! (just go read and download, now!)
• The amazing, and sleepless (I'm sure of it! Just look at the blogs he's released!), Rob Winch just announced the first milestone of Spring Security 4.0.0 featuring testing support.
• Spring HATEOAS 0.11 is now available, and features an API for client-side service traversal called Traverson.
• Spring Data Neo4j lead Michael Hunger and I will be giving a webinar on the new awesome in Spring Data Neo4j 3.0 and Neo4j 2.0 on May 20th.
• Not skipping a beat, Xavier Padró has put together a very nice post on using Spring Integration's Java API.
• Spring framework ninja Stéphane Nicoll has just put up a nice blog post introducing the annotation-driven JMS support in the upcoming Spring framework 4.1.
• Want to learn more about Neo4j and Spring Data Neo4J? There's a nice little tutorial on JavaBeat about Spring Data Neo4j. The English is a little choppy and the code examples are garbled with noise, but I think you should still be able to get the gist of it. If you want a more contemporary, Java-centric alternative, check out these guides on using Spring Data Neo4j and using Spring Data Neo4j with Spring Data REST
• If that's still not enough Neo4j, if you're in the Bay Area, then you might want to checkout the meetup that Spring Data Neo4J lead Michael Hunger (and I) will be holding this Thursday, May 8th!
• My pal Andy Piper and I gave a talk at SpringOne2GX 2013 about running and writing Spring applications on Cloud Foundry. Check it out!
• Scott Frederick and Cornelia Davis introduce how to add custom services and runtimes to Cloud Foundry in this amazing talk from SpringOne2GX 2013.
• Did you check out the new Project Reactor release? The new release is packed with cool stuff (including API improvements, a general-purpose object pool and a lot more!) and it paves the way for Reactor 2.0, which will base its Promise and Streams support on the Reactive Streams proejct. Nice!
• Phil Whelan over on the ActiveState blog has a nice post introducing buildpacks. Buildpacks came from Heroku, but of course you can use them in Cloud Foundry and - as with ActiveState's own Stackato project - they work with projects that are built on Cloud Foundry.

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! Last week I finished an absolutely lovely time in Bangalore, India, and yesterday I popped into Leuven, Belgium at the insanely poplar Devoxx conference founder Stephan Janssen's invitation for a quick visit to the Belgium Java User Group where I got to hang out with some absolutely amazingly enthusiastic locals and, of course, my pal and Spring framework committer Stéphane Nicoll. Naturally, the video of the whole thing should be up on Parleys at some point soon, too!

Let's dive right into it!

1. Spring Social co-founder and lead Craig Walls has just announced the long awaited Spring Social 1.1.0 release! This new release is fantastic! If you've been following the pre-release cuts over the last year and a half, then you'll know there's been some deep rethinking on how to easily expose Spring Social's Java configuration. The final release is both concise and general purpose. I am super excited to see this and will begin updating my various Spring Social-powered OAuth clients accordingly! VERY nice job, Craig!
2. Did you see the new "minor" Spring Boot release, 1.0.2? I use quotes because, with Spring Boot, even the minor releases pack a punch! Dr. Syer announced the release and pointed out - among other things - the fancy new @IntegrationTest annotation. Awesome! (now excuse me while I go update my Boot projects...)
3. Join me and Ashley Puls from New Relic tomorrow April 30th as we track and trace our way through a Javascript (frontend) and Java/Spring (backend) application.
4. Spring Integration is looking at an incredible new release -- full support for Annotations and Java Configuration + some Spring Boot support! With 4.0, you'll be able to make XML - free integration applications. Project lead Gary Russell taking you through all the new hotness in the webinar, Spring Integration 4.0, the new frontier, on May 13.
5. Spring Data Neo4j lead Michael Hunger and I will be giving a webinar on the new awesome in Spring Data Neo4j 3.0 and Neo4j 2.0 on May 20th.
6. Continuing the series on Project Sagan, Spring framework ninja Brian Clozel has just written up a very nice look at how Project Sagan does client-side JavaScript. This is a great look at what modern, client-side applications look like with npm, grunt, and gulp. Best part? The content is delivered as a video! Perfect!
7. Spring Roo has a major contributor in DISID! Check out this great post from my pal Pieter Humphrey on the future of Spring Roo.
8. Get 90 minutes with Chris Richardson at SpringOne2GX 2013 as he discusses futures in Java, Scala and Javascript. And no, we don't mean product roadmaps. Check out his session titled: Futures and Rx Observables: powerful abstractions for consuming web services asynchronously.
9. You you still think that Spring is just for dependency injection? Join Mark Secrist for an amazing and revealing look at fundamental concepts like the underlying design patterns, and building blocks of the framework - highly reusable insights. Watch the replay of his SpringOne2GX 2013 session: Going beyond Dependency Injection.
10. Xavier Padró put together a nice post on how to use Spring Integration to configure a timeout when acting as a web-service client
11. IntelliJ ninja Andrey Cheptsov has put together a lovely post on how to use the Jetbrains-originated language Kotlin, the NoSQL database MongoDB, Spring Boot, and the PaaS Heroku together. Nice!
12. Petri Kainulainen is back at it again, this time with a great post on using jOOQ - which makes working with SQL easier - along with Spring to handle paging and sorting.
13. Roger Hughes has a cool post on tracking exceptions with Spring's Quartz scheduling support.
14. There are some nice posts on the Time is running out, don't lose it. blog. The first one of note is this post on a weird ClassNotFoundException that presents itself on older versions of Spring Integration on JBoss EAP 6.2
15. The second, slightly older, post is on using the Spring Integration MQTT adapter to communicate with MQTT-powered services. MQTT is a lightweight messaging protocol that is at the heart of many internet-of-things based solutions today. Who knows? Your refrigerator might be using it! :)
16. Want to run a more production-like Hadoop instance on your local machine? Don't want to run a full virtual machine? Check out this post on deploying Pivotal's HD Hadoop distro using Docker! (and then, check out Spring for Hadoop and Spring XD!)

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Bangalore, India, for the Great Indian Developer Summit talking to developers about (wait for it..) Spring! I also met with a large system integrator here in Bangalore's Electronic City and addressed a large team of architects and engineers using Spring on projects worldwide. India's an interesting place because so much of their business comes from companies abroad who are trying to get extra help on otherwise overwhelming projects. Naturally, anything that helps get more done, quicker, is of interest here and Spring's a favorite. Needless to say, Spring Boot resonated a lot! It's not all work, though, when the local food is as good as it is here! :)

Lots of webinars and replays this week - we've got a lot to cover, so let's get to it!

• Hadoop hungry? Get ready for a feast - Dr. Mark Pollack and the XD team have announced that Spring XD 1.0.0 M6 is now available. This new release has a TON of new features, including support running on YARN, Zookeeper support for the DIRT distributed runtime, machine-learning algorithms, improved shell tab-completion, a Reactor-powered TCP/UDP source that can do 1M+ tx/sec on cheap hardware, default FTP to HDFS job, and much more! (No, really, we mean that). This release felt more like they somehow skipped all the 1.0.x milestones and released a "2.0" version!
• Reactor project lead Jon Brisbin has announced, along with other engineers at Typesafe, Netflix, Twitter, and more, the new common API for reactive stream processing. This is huge!
• Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke has just announced that Spring Data Codd, service release 2, is now available. This new release is huge, so be sure to check them all out!
• Dr. Dave Syer has just announced the release of Spring Security OAuth 2.0.0.RC1. This project has evolved very quickly, and I've enjoyed updating the code to my talk, The Spring REST Stack, to use the progressively more concise and powerful iterations. I've updated that branch (still updating unit tests) to use Spring Security 2.0.0.RC1. It's a working OAuth-secured REST service that supports HTTP and HTTPS, can run standalone or as a traditional .war, and uses a custom UserDetailsService bean and Java 8 lambdas. Not bad!
• Spring Integration is looking at an incredible new release -- full support for Annotations and Java Configuration + some Spring Boot support! With 4.0, you'll be able to make XML - free integration applications. Project lead Gary Russell taking you through all the new hotness in the webinar, Spring Integration 4.0, the new frontier, on May 13.
• On April 30th, join me and Ashley Puls from New Relic as we track and trace our way through a Javascript (frontend) and Java/Spring (backend) application.
• Chris Beams has put together another great post on the Sagan project, this one on moving to Java 8. Check it out!
• The replay for my recent talk, Building "Bootiful" Applications with Spring Boot, is now available on our YouTube channel.
• Spring Security lead Rob Winch is back with another post on advanced Spring MVC test integrations with common third party projects. This post is about testing web applications using Geb.
• Spring Data Neo4j lead Michael Hunger and I will be giving a webinar on the new awesome in Spring Data Neo4j 3.0 and Neo4j 2.0 on May 20th.
• Search on the brain? You have front row seats to 90 minutes with our former colleague and Spring committer Costin Leau, now at Elasticsearch: Your Data, Your Search, Elasticsearch.
• Don't miss Pivotal's Mike Wiesner as he tackles pragmatic Application Security (beyond just spring security) in this SpringOne2GX 2013 Replay: Application Security Pitfalls.
• Groovy language lead Guillaume LaForge's epic Groovy Weekly column is coming along nicely! There's always good stuff, and this week's no exception. Check it out if you dig all things Groovy (and Grails).
• This project, by Alexandre Rafalovitch, aims to improve the SOLR JavaDocs. There's a lot to admire here, but I liked this Spring Boot example which demonstrates a REST endpoint connected to a SOLR instance. Nice!
• Fabio Maffioletti has put together a very nice post that evolves the discussion on how to use JTA with Spring (in particular, with Spring Boot and Spring Data JPA) via Atomikos to coordinate transactions across two different databases. This post starts with an older post I wrote in 2011 on the same topic, introduces Spring Boot and Spring Data, and changes the example from one database and a JMS broker to a database and another database through JPA. This is really cool!
• Yuan Ji has been putting together very nice posts on building HAL-compliant REST services with Spring HATEOAS, unit testing them and - most recently - consuming those services with Angular-HAL.
• Our pal Brian Hannaway is back, this time with a post on building Spring Batch applications. The content is really good, and worth a read for anybody who wants to love and learn Spring Batch. In the post, Brian demonstrates how to build a Batch application using the XML namespace. Spring Batch also supports a very nice Java configuration API and - with Spring Boot - writing a Spring Batch application can be very concise. I took Brian's very cool example and wrote a different version using Spring Boot and the Java configuration API for reference. Definitely start with Brian's blog, though, as the code in my repository will make little sense otherwise!

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week, I'm in Paris, France talking to developers about Spring Framework 4.0, Spring Boot, and more at Devoxx FR. Next week it's off to Bangalore, India for the Great Indian Developer Summit. As always, ping me online if you're around either location and want to talk Spring.

1. Tuesday April 30th Webinar - don't miss Ashley Puls (New Relic) and myself as they track and trace through modern web apps: Web Application Diagnostics with Java and Javascript
2. Tuesday April 22nd Webinar - see what stole the EclipseCon 2014 keynote: Martin Lippert and Mike Milinkovich demoing alpha versions of Project Flux: Connecting Eclipse to the Cloud-Based Era of Developer Tooling. Register today!
3. Thomas Risberg and Janne Valkealahti show how they can use a single programming model / configuration model for Java MapReduce, Streaming, Hive, Pig, Cascading, or HBase in this SpringOne2GX 2013 Replay: Getting started with Spring Data and Apache Hadoop
4. 90 minutes with Jags Ramnarayan and Anthony Baker at SpringOne2GX 2013: In-memory data and compute on top of Hadoop
5. Check out Kevin Nilson (Google) and myself co-presenting at SpringOne2GX 2013 on Spring Profiles, and how it is an amazing tool for managing code through the normal dev/stage/production lifecycle: Multi Environment Spring Applications.
6. I'm back with Roy Clarkson at SpringOne2GX 2013 talking about Spring Mobile/Android, REST/OAUTH and more in: Building Smart Clients with Spring
7. Erdem Günay has put together a very nice post on how he used the Spring Expression Language (SpEL) and Spring Boot to dynamically send remote installation instructions to a wide array of Android clients, dynamically.
8. Our pal Sam Brannen is going to be speaking at the Atlanta Spring User Group! One of the smart
9. Moritz Schulze put together a very, very detailed post on how his company developed a time tracking, vacation-time managing application called Trackr with Java 8 and Spring Boot
10. Mario Arias has put together a version of the Spring relational data Getting Started Guide using the Kotlin language. Kotlin is JetBrains' statically typed programming language to JVM byte codes and JavaScript. Very cool! I have never seen the kotlinprimavera module(s) before, but I dig it!
11. Patrick Chanezon, director of enterprise evangelism at Microsoft, sat in on the vJUG meetup talk I gave on Spring Boot recently and set about hacking! The result is some guidance on how to deploy a Spring Boot application to Microsoft's Azure PaaS. Nice! Merci, Patrick!
12. Hai Nguyen has put together a very nice post on how to configure / consume an embedded Jetty's JNDI-bound DataSource
13. Did you miss Spring framework lead Juergen Hoeller's epic talk about Spring 4 and Java 8 from GOTO Amsterdam? Have no fear, you can watch it online!
14. This is a particularly PaaSy This Week in Spring! Kim Saabye Pedersen has written a nice post on using Spring Boot on RedHat's OpenShift PaaS
15. Our friend Petri Kainulainen is back, this time with a very nice post on using JOOQ with Spring. Petri's an amazing person to have in the community. I hope you don't need me to tell you that. Bookmark his site. It's almost always worth it.
16. Our pal at Netflix, Tomás Lin, is back! This time he's got a post on bundling web content with Spring Boot and Gradle
17. Michael Simons posted a very detailed post on how he's developing a Boot web application. Thanks for the detailed writeup, Michael. Very valuable feedback.

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring!

Tomorrow, I'll be presenting on the vJUG, a virtual JUG, about Spring Boot. Don't tell anyone, but the presentation itself is going to be based on a talk that Spring Boot co-founder Phil Webb and I have been planning. The code is already online, so check it out and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow! If you miss the talk, and you happen to be in the bay area, then join us on Thursday evening at the Pivotal offices here in San Francisco for a more caffeinated version of the same talk with both Phil and myself!

Then, this Sunday, I'm off to spread the Spring love! I'll touchdown first in Paris for Devoxx FR. From there, it's off to Bangalore, India, for the Great Indian Developer Summit. I haven't been there since 2012 and am very much looking forward to it and to seeing the amazing Spring community there. Then, on my way home I'll pop in to Belgium for a talk at the Belgium JUG…

Welcome everybody to a momentous This Week in Spring - Boot edition!

Today is, of course, April Fools day. There is a lot of great stuff out there as April 1st jokes go! We didn't prepare any practical jokes this year, but I always like to point people to this still-epic video of Spring co-founder Rod Johnson announcing the sale of SpringSource (as the company where Spring originated was named) to Microsoft! (in 2008, on April Fools)

That out of the way, there's far more interesting stuff to talk about today (with no bearing whatsoever on April Fools): Spring Boot which - just this morning - finally went GA! Congratulations to Phillip Webb and Dr. Dave Syer (and the scores of people who've helped them) on this amazing release.

I don't know what it looks like from the outside, looking in, but we on the Spring team have been watching Philip and Dave drive Boot from concept, to polished prototype where it made a huge splash at SpringOne2GX 2013, to GA over the last year and some change. Boot has informed many of the other Spring projects, including Spring Framework 4.0. A truly game-changing technology, and not just for the JVM, either.

If you haven't tried it yet, then now is the time. There'a a video on using Spring Boot from STS 3.5 (which is due soon as well). STS isn't required at all, but it does have some handy tools! Check it out.

1. The big news: Spring Boot 1.0.0 has reached it's first major release!
2. Spring Integration ninja Artem Bilan has just announced Spring Integration 3.0.2 and Spring Integration 4.0 M4. The new stuff in Spring Integration 3.0.2 is awesome, but scroll down for the Spring Integration, Boot & Java configuration demo! I'm tickled pink to see this release. #boot
3. Spring lead Juergen Hoeller has announced the Spring 4.0.3 release, with Java 8 support and much improved websocket support.
4. Spring Data legend Thomas Darimont has announced that Spring Data Redis 1.2.1 is now available. The new release includes bugfixes for RedisCacheManager and RedisTemplate.
5. Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke has just released the first milestone of Spring Data Dijkstra. Check it out!
6. On April 9, I'll be doing a vJUG presentation, live and worldwide, introducing Spring Boot. My hope is to - in the short space alloted - demonstrate what building an application with Spring Boot looks like. I'd love to see you there, and please feel free to also ask questions on the IRC channel. #boot
7. Our pal Chris Richardson has chimed in with a blog that describes an approach to building Microservices with Spring Boot. The example is in Scala. Check it out! #boot
8. Spring Boot's been nominated for Most Innovative Java technology. I'm not sure how the voting process works, but as soon as I find out, I'll post here. Either way, I hope we can count on your help to drive votes through! #boot
9. Marco Vermeulen put together a very nice talk introducing how to use Spring Boot to build microservices, as well. This example is in Groovy. #boot
10. Jim Drannbauer has put together a GitHub repository demonstrating how to use the recently released Spring MVC Test HtmlUnit and Cucumber together. With this in place, your unit tests almost read like human sentences! #boot
11. Our pal Matt Raible is back at it again, this time with not one, but two posts on using Spring Boot! The first post demonstrates how to add Swagger integration to a Spring Boot application, and the second demonstrates what its like to build an iOS client to a Boot backend application using the Ionic framework. #boot
12. The all and sundry blog is back, this time with a post on using Spring Boot and Scala together. Nice! Boot's a win no matter what language you're using! #boot
13. Sergi Almar is back this week with a post on how to monitor your websocket threadpools using JMX. This is a fine followup to his last post on detecting websocket connection and disconnection in Spring 4. #boot
14. The team behind our website has installed Disqus for comments on our blogs. I wish I could show you the emails, but the turnaround from "idea" to "comments are live!" in this instance was insanely quick. Agile, even.
15. Adam Shook gave a talk SpringOne2GX 2013 Replay: Hadoop - Just the Basics for Big Data Rookies at SpringOne2GX 2013 whose replay is now available online. Don't miss it!
16. Also available online is David Turanski and Luke Taylor's talk from SpringOne2GX 2013, Real Time Analytics with Spring. Check it out!
17. The replay of the talk that Spring LDAP lead Mattias Arthursson gave at SpringOne2GX 2013 last year introducing Spring LDAP 2.0 is now live

18. Did you miss Spring lead Juergen Hoeller's webinar introducing Spring 4 on Java 8? It's available now and definitely worth a watch!

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week is going to be a crazy week, and I can't wait to see you on the other end of it next week! There are some BIG announcements coming! Keep your eyes glued to spring.io this week: So. Much. Win. Alright, with that out of the way, let's get to it!

• Spring Boot co-lead and all-around awesome guy Phil Webb has announced that Spring Boot 1.0.0.RC5 is now available. I can't stress this enough: download the bits, try 'em out and give them a smoke test against your code. The GA release is very soon, and we want to have as few surprises as possible!
• Speaking of Spring Boot, Erdem Gunay put together a very cool post detailing how he took an existing app, reworked it with Spring Boot and got it up and running in one week. Wow! I note that one point he points to a configuration file that's all in XML, but it doesn't need to be. In fact, the beans so configured would be more concisely described in java. Check out the post, either way! Great stuff, Erdem!
• Spring Security lead Rob Winch has put together a nice introduction to using Spring Test MVC with HtmlUnit, which he introduced last week.
• Spring lead Juergen Hoeller has put together a really good look at the state of Java 8 in enterprise projects - a great, pragmatic resource for people stuck on eariler JDK versions.
• Speaking of Java 8, my pal Pieter Humphrey shared a great resource on the subject of Java 8 first-class functions in Manning's Java 8 tutorial video. Check it out!
• The Syntx.co blog has a nice post on how to use Spring 4's websocket support along with a simple client-side example
• Sergi Almar's Blog has a great post on Detecting WebSocket Connects and Disconnects in Spring 4. Great for presence detection usecases in games, chat, etc.
• Sergi Almar is on fire this week! He also posted a some good info on how to Track your WebSocket messages with Spring 4 and RabbitMQ.
• SpringOne2GX 2013 Replay: Tips and Tricks for Client Side Performance by Scott Andrews is now up on YouTube!
• It's Javascript March madness around here - another Javascript session from SpringOne 2GX: AOP-ing your JavaScript by Brian Calavier is now up on YouTube!
• OK, I confess, I almost didn't include this post because of its name. I won't repeat it here, but if you can look past the name and just read the post, it's hilarious and - to be honest- a rather good narrative on choosing a dependency injection approach.
• The DevCrumb blog has a nice post introducing how to use Spring 3.2.2 and Hibernate 4.2.0 together. This works but I'd advise against using any XML configuration (or any configuration at all!) if it can be helped. Most of the code in this post goes away if you use Spring Boot. If you also use Spring Data JPA repositories (and why wouldn't you?), then all of the code except for the Person entity can be thrown away.
• There's a neat post on JournalDev by Pankaj Kumar that looks at using Spring's AOP support.