Welcome back to yet another This Week in Spring. SpringSource is out in full force at JAX San Jose this week and we will be at OSCON, in July. These events are great avenues for us to connect with the userbase. As usual, we've got a nice complement of stuff to cover this week, so let's get to it!

      <LI>  There has been loads of interest and discussion surrounding last week's <a href="http://blog.springsource.com/2011/06/09/spring-framework-3-1-m2-released/">Spring 3.1 second milestone</a>.  Sam Brannen writes about the <a href="http://blog.springsource.com/2011/06/21/spring-3-1-m…

Welcome back to another installment of "This Week in Spring," and what a week it's been! This last week saw the release of the Spring 3.1 M2 and vFabric 5! Lots of exciting stuff to talk about there, as well as general community news, so let's get to it!

1. Today VMware announced the release of VMware vFabric 5, the application platform that defines the future of enterprise Java for cloud and virtualized execution environments. vFabric 5 contains many of the technologies that the Spring community is already familiar with including tc Server, Hyperic, GemFire, and RabbitMQ, but now adds some new technology.
   • Elastic Memory for Java (EM4J): a new capability for tc Server that provides a completely new level of coordination between the application server and the underlying virtual machine. EM4J uses the underlying vSphere virtualization to overcome some of the limitations of the Java's static memory heap.
   • Spring Insight Operations: leverages the same code-level tracing technology from the Spring Insight project but pulls together information from multiple application servers into a single console with roll-up views, drill downs, and historical comparisons ready for production systems.
   • SQLFire: vFabric SQLFire leverages the time-tested vFabric GemFire underpinnings providing data at memory speed and horizontal scale but vFabric SQLFire adds familiar and standard SQL and JDBC interfaces to the service.

   Rod Johnson discusses all the details of the release in his latest blog. Be sure to check out the latest release and try it out.

2. Spring core lead Juergen Hoeller has announced that Spring 3.1.0 M2 has been released! At long last, the next step on the steady march to Spring 3.1 GA! The new release is as feature-packed as the last one, with a long list of major new features including (but definitely not limited to!) improved Java configuration support, XML-free and hassle-free Servlet 3.0-based Spring MVC application bootstrapping, new Builder APIs for JPA and Hibernate, and much, much more! Check out the release announcement here and get the bits from your build dependency management tool of choice or the download page

<LI> Hot on the heels of the Spring 3.1 release announcement, <a href="http://blog.springsource.com/2011/06/10/spring-3-1-m2-configuration-enhancements/">Chris Beams chimes in</a> on the much-improved Java-centric configuration model in Spring 3.1, M2, even as compared to M1! The features are really starting to come together to make this one of the smoothest, well arranged releases, yet! </LI> 

<lI> 

Spring 3.1 M2 represents a marked improvement in core Spring, as well as Spring MVC! Rossen Stoyanchev chimes in to introduce the numerous (truly, you'll need to read the detailed blog to…

Welcome back to another exciting roundup! This week's been a blur. Honestly. So much new stuff happening, all after the rush of excitement that was the S2G Forums in Europe last week. Leave's a guy breathless, but excited. Read on!

1. Mark Fisher and Ramnivas Laddad's webinar Spring From Zero to Cloud in 60 Minutes is available online.
   This webinar is a breakneck-speed tour of some of the Spring, Spring Roo and Grails support on CloudFoundry. Check it out!
   Before you start watching, however, quickly signup at CloudFoundry.com to get access to the public, free-beta cloud service. If you want to checkout the code and learn more, check out CloudFoundry.org.

2. Jeremy Grelle, Spring BlazeDS lead and general "Spring web dude," has announced the first release candidate of the Spring Flex project. The Spring Flex project integrates the Flex BlazeDS middleware with Spring, providing a dead-simple way to expose Spring beans in a way that can be consumed by Flex or Adobe AIR web and desktop clients. The Spring Flex project also provides integration with Spring Security and provides tight-knit support for server-side push based messaging, entirely in-BlazeDS, or through JMS or Spring Integration. Ever wanted to notify users logged into an application that something's happened on the server side (Twitter message, new AMQP message, new XMPP message, whatever..)? Spring Flex makes it easy.
3. Martin Lippert, SpringSource Tool Suite team lead, has given an interview about the latest and greatest in SpringSource Tool Suite 2.6. He talks about many of the highlights, including STS 2.6's reworked Spring Webflow visualization, Java configuration support, the cloud, agent-based reloading, and what's next. Check it out!
4. Thomas Risberg has announced the Spring Data Document support for MongoDB, release 1.0.0.M3. The changes and new features in Spring Data Document 1.0.0.M3 includes much improved mapping and conversion support. The MappingMongoConverter is now the default converter used by the MongoTemplate and the SimpleMongoConverter has been deprecated and will be removed. The concept of a default collection name has also been removed and all operations of the MongoTemplate are based on the collection name used for the entity class that is the target of the operation. The collection name used for an entity class defaults to the classname starting with a lower-case letter but it can be customized using the @Document annotation. See the changelog for more details.
5. Milestone 5 of Virgo 3.0.0 is available for download. This is an important milestone which adds significant functional enhancements, upgrades several dependencies to their latest levels including Spring 3.0.5, Tomcat 7.0.12, and Servlet 3.0, and fixes a number of bugs. Full details are available in the release notes. The Virgo Web Server from EclipseRT is a completely module-based Java application server that is designed to run enterprise Java applications and Spring-powered applications with a high degree of flexibility and reliability. It offers a simple yet comprehensive platform to develop, deploy, and service enterprise Java applications.
6. Marius Bogoevici - a Spring Integration committer - has written a fantastic post on the options for using a JPA EntityManager in JBoss AS with Spring. The main thrust of the post is that the application server automatically creates an EntityManager, by default, so there may be no need to recreate one in Spring - you can simply inject the existing reference. This approach is specifically to get around the presumptuous behavior of a full blown application server. If you'd like to run in Tomcat, then Spring's the easiest way to configure a JPA EntityManager. Marius also explains how to let Spring run the show entirely by disabling the application server behavior. This has the plural benefits of usually being more performant, and of keeping configuration with the application itself, not the server.
7. Matt Raible has posted a follow up to his blog posts and screencasts on security in web applications. Previously, he demonstrated how to use Spring Security, Apache Shiro, and Java EE security in a pseudo identical fashion to secure a web application, highlighting the differences as appropriate. This follow up article talks about all three technologies and provides a comparison for enabling programmatic login when integrated in a Spring MVC application. The Spring Security support has been around for a long time and works in numerous containers (not Just Java EE 6 compliant containers) with no fuss. Nice!
8. Have you dabbled in other JVM based languages? Have you taken a look at Scala? Well at the recent Scala Days conference in Palo Alto, CA, the Cloud Foundry team announced new Scala support on CloudFoundry.com!
9. If you were at the S2G Forums in London last week, you would've received a free copy of the Open Source Journal - a printed (and freely downloadable .PDF) magazine. This publication has done a bang up job covering some of the Spring framework technologies. It's available from the publisher's web site as a free download. Check out the first and second issues here. The second issue, for example, has a great introduction to Spring.NET (including the new code configuration - the .NET analog to Spring Java's Java configuration), a look at Spring.NET's RestTemplate (a nice analog to Spring Java's RestTemplate), and a look at using Spring Integration (and Spring Web Services) to make short work of exposing web services. This format is especially ideal if you have a .PDF-capable e-reader or tablet PC. Check it out!

The excitement continues today at the SpringSource S2G forums here in London! The energy leading up to the event has been staggering, and the talks - on a wide variety of deep, technical topics - are very impressive! I've had several of my questions answered, and learned a lot about some of the new, interesting, upcoming technologies from SpringSource. If you didn't get a chance to attend this year, we will be posting the session slides next week. Also don't forget, there is still SpringOne 2GX later this year (October) in Chicago!

1. Many people love Spring Batch as soon as they give it a try, and many of those people then start trying to tell others about it precisely because it's so wonderful to know that they won't have to solve the problem themselves. Batch processing's something we all do at some point or another: moving data from database to another, reading from a file system, making web service calls and need to handle retry logic, etc. These use cases (and many more) are natural fits for Spring Batch. If you want to see one very succinct, useful introduction to the technology with an emphasis on code, check out Sanjoy Kumar Roy's blog introducing Spring Batch. Very cool! If you give Spring Batch a try and feel like you have something to add to the discussion, write a blog and ping me to let me know so I can highlight it on this page!.

	<li>
		Roy Clarkson notes that starting May 28, 2011, the repositories for <a href="http://www.springsource.org/spring-android">Spring Android</a> and <A HREF ="http://www.springsource.org/spring-mobile">Spring Mobile</a> have moved to GitHub, and are available at the following URLs:

	<div><b>Spring Android:<br/></b>
		<UL><li><a href="https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-android">Spring Android</a></li>
		<LI><A href="https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-android-samples">Spring Android Samples</a>
			</li> </div>
				<div><b>Spring Mobile:<br/></b>
					<UL><li><a href="https…

What a week! Excitement is in the air as we near the S2G Forums here in Amsterdam on the 26th and then next week in London on the 31st of May. If you're in Europe, be sure not to miss these exciting, jam-packed days with talks on all manner of topics including Spring, Grails, the cloud, big data and of course tooling.

1. Mark Fisher and Ramnivas Laddad presented their hit webinar - "From Zero to Cloud in 60 Minutes" - on Cloud Foundry last week. Thank you all for attending and making it a success! If you missed it, you can still get the slides and watch the replay here. Note that there are, as usual, lots of other resources there once you're done with the CloudFoundry webinar. Check out the other developer webinars (scroll down, click on the "Developers" tab), and check out the SpringSource Dev YouTube page.
2. Juergen Hoeller, the Spring project lead, presented on the next generation of Spring -- Spring 3.1 and beyond, at QCon London earlier this year. His talk and slides are available on InfoQ.com
3. The video for the Getting Started with Spring Data Graph webinar is available, as well. This webinar introduces the Spring Data Graph project - a joint effort between the Spring and Neo4j engineering teams to bring first-class support for Neo4J to your Spring applications. If you want a more natural way to integrate the NOSQL data technologies in your existing architecture, simply want more speed, or want to see what you're missing, then you should definitely check this webinar out.
4. In a fantastic example of eating ones own dogfood, Mark Thomas - Tomcat committer and Apache Bug tracking infrastructure maintainer - explains how the Apache JIRA interface was being whelmed - not overwhelmed, but still running inefficiently - by search engines that hit specific JIRAs, but didn't maintain a session cookie, triggering the creation of numerous sessions. Mark describes the creation of a custom Valve for Tomcat 7 (and SpringSource's tcServer) that associates a single Tomcat session with each web crawler, greatly reducing their footprint.
5. Spring Web Services 2.0.2 has been released. For more information, see the change log. Spring Web Services 1.5.1.0 has also been released. For the changes in this release, please see the changelog. Both releases include some worthy updates in of themselves, but, importantly, both also resolve a potential security issue. It is recommended that users upgrade as soon as possible.

<LI> Google I/O, Google's developer conference, is an exciting time for enterprise Java developers, and of course, this also means Spring developers. One notable announcement was the <a href="http://vaadin.com/springroo">1.0 release of the Spring Roo plugin for Vaadin,</a> which is a widget-centric approach to web application development.  Vaadin's a very innovative way to build web applications today, and - of course - <a href="http://vaadin.com/wiki/-/wiki/Main/Spring%20Integration">it works well with Spring.</a> (NB: those instructions are old, but they should still work, and you can just…

It's May, already! Seems like just yesterday we were toasting the arrival of the new year...

As they say, time flies when you're having fun! This year's been a roller coaster - exciting news and events every day - too much to keep up with, certainly!

1. Jon Brisbin has written up an epic post introducing the CloudFoundry project and many of the technologies that you can use on it.

   This was just put up today, and is now one of my favorite blogs introducing CloudFoundry; it's so ambitious, just like CloudFoundry itself!

2. Another masterpiece of a sample is the blog that Costin Leau wrote, Getting Started with Redis and Spring Cloud Foundry. This post is well worth reading whether you're doing CloudFoundry, Spring Data, or both. A dynamic duo, indeed!

<li>European community members can learn more about Spring, Spring Data and Cloud Foundry at the S2G Forum Series: <a href="http://www.springsource.com/events/s2gforum-5-26-2011-amsterdam">Amsterdam…

Another week, another great allotment of new content that - as usual - draws from the community and from SpringSource. The enthusiasm for CloudFoundry continues unabated this week, with some interesting content in this week's roundup. For more content on CloudFoundry, you might consult the CloudFoundry.com and CloudFoundry.org sites. In particular, the slides from the Cloud user group held the day after the announcement are available here.

1. Oliver Gierke has posted a blog on Advanced Spring Data JPA which explains how to use the features in the Spring Data JPA project that elevate the art of JPA programming, like the integration of the QueryDSL library. This post - and the library - speak to the ongoing, first-class support in the Spring frameworks for all data access technologies, be they RDBMS, NoSQL, or anything else.
2. Peter Ledbrook, Grails Developer Advocate, has recently expanded on his original blog on using Grails and CloudFoundry.

   This blog provides a detailed look at using Grails' GORM support with the various data stores available on CloudFoundry. Check it out!

3. Alex Popescu's MyNoSQL portal, MyNoSQL, has some interesting comments about the NoSQL options supported in CloudFoundry. He comments that "From a storage perspective, Cloud Foundry is encouraging polyglot persistence right from the start offering access to a relational database (MySQL), a super-fast smart key-value store (Redis), and a popular document database (MongoDB)."
   This post - and indeed the entire site - is a very valuable resource for CloudFoundry users that want to exploit the NoSQL options, but don't understand the use cases yet. There's a lot of good content on both MongoDB and Redis, for example.
4. Mark Thomas, Apache Tomcat 7 release manager and engineer, has written up a post on Apache Tomcat 7's session fixation protection security feature on the TomcatExpert.com website. Keeping on top of the latest Tomcat security features is important if you are, like the majority of developers, using Tomcat (or hardened, ops-friendly derivatives like SpringSource's tcServer) as a production server for your Java (and often Spring) applications. Additionally, Tomcat's bundled with several application servers. Either way, knowing about Tomcat's industry-leading features can only help.
5. Costin Leau has announced the Spring GemFire 1.0.1 release, which incorporates bug fixes and promotes stability.

<li>Just a reminder to our European community members, the S2G Forum Series will be held in <a href="http://www.springsource.com/events/s2gforum-5-26-2011-amsterdam">Amsterdam (May 26th)</a> and <a href="http://www.springsource.com/events/s2gforum-5-31-2011-london">London (May 31st)</a>. There will be tons of great sessions about Spring, Groovy and Grails as well as talks focused specifically on CloudFoundry, Tomcat and Gemfire so be sure to <a href…

Welcome back to This Week in Spring. The enthusiasm for last week's Cloud Foundry announcement was outstanding and appears to be getting stronger! People all over the world have flooded the SpringSource and CloudFoundry forums, downloads pages and source repositories. What unprecedented activity!

Many of the different, powerful technologies coming out of SpringSource recently have been leading up to the Cloud Foundry release so I invite you to review some of the exciting stuff that's come out in the last few months that have become even more interesting in terms of the cloud and Cloud Foundry: Spring Gemfire, Spring AMQP, Spring 3.1 profiles, Spring 3.1 caching abstraction, Spring Data, Spring Integration support for NoSQL, and Spring Hadoop, vFabric Hyperic, vFabric RabbitMQ, and vFabric GemFire. Of course, for all of these technologies - the first, and best, tooling and development experience continues to be SpringSource Tool Suite and Spring Roo.

Ok, onward to this week's review. So much exciting stuff, so little time!

1. Christian Dupuis has just written up a detailed blog on using STS to deploy to Cloud Foundry.

 <li><A href="http://www.springsource.org/node/3103">Spring Roo 1.1.3</a>, featuring 
 Cloud Foundry support, shell enhancements, and improved support for composite primary keys - among other things - has been released. 
</li>

	 <li> DZone has published a <a href="http://refcardz.dzone.com/refcardz/spring-roo-open-source-rapid?oid=hom38521">Spring Roo RefCard</a> by the Spring Roo team's <a href="http://www.twitter.com/schmidtstefan">Stefan Schmidt.</a> This RefCard's a fantastic way to get going quickly with Spring Roo. Spring Roo, it could be argued, is ideally suited to the RefCard…

This year is moving along at a very quick clip!

We've already seen a torrent of new and exciting releases for Spring users and just today news of perhaps the most exciting thing yet went out. If you didn't get it because you aren't, for example, a registered SpringSource Tool Suite user, then here are the salient bits:

Next Tuesday - April 12th - VMware is hosting a webinar - "Spring into the cloud!" - with the provocative explanation, "Spring has already simplified enterprise Java development. Next up is cloud development."

The webinar will be presented for both Europe and North America timezones. See this page for details, and don't…

Well, that was a good week! Lots of good stuff coming out of both the community and of course out of SpringSource itself.

This week reminded I was reminded that the Spring framework usually has something that could go a long way in simplifying or alleviating a challenge at hand if you just know where to look. Often, I'll check the SpringSource Forums, the JIRA instance, and - if I'm sufficiently convinced it's not already resolved or accounted for in the forums or in JIRA - in the StackOverflow category for Spring. SpringSource engineers try to monitor both the forums and - less ocassionally - the StackOverflow forums, as well. Additionally, I like to learn as I go - it's a "cinch by the inch, hard by the…