One of the most interesting capabilities of Spring Cloud is its extensibility. You can extend it to support additional clouds, enhance already supported clouds, support new services, new service connectors--all without modifying the Spring Cloud code itself. In this blog, we explore this capability. If you haven’t done so already, please read the first and second blog in this series to acquire sufficient background.

The three axes of extensibility

Spring Cloud provides extensibility along three orthogonal directions. You may extend it in one of these directions and orthogonality ensures that…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week saw the release of the amazing Spring XD 1.0.0.RELEASE. The release announcement is a good place to start your big-data journey. There, you'll find links to other great posts, learning content, etc. This is a great opportunity to evaluate what you hope to get out of your data, and whether you're getting it. Spring XD is your big-data Swiss-army knife: it can support live, streaming workloads; batch-centric offline workloads; and general data integration solutions. If you digest but one post from this week's roundup, let it be …

In the last blog, I showed you how to use Spring Cloud's Java configuration option to obtain service connectors declaratively (there is also XML namespace support, if you need it). In this blog, we will take a closer look at how you would use Spring Cloud programmatically. This will help in the situations where you cannot use Java or XML configuration. It will also demystify how Spring Cloud works and prepare for the next blog in this series, where we discuss extending Spring Cloud.

To work with Spring Cloud we need to access an object of the Cloud class. However, you can’t create a Cloud object directly (its constructor is not public). Instead, you will obtain it through CloudFactory…

Recently Juergen Hoeller announced the availability of the first of two 4.1 release candidates. Brian Clozel followed up with a post on the static web resources handling enhancements. Previously Stephane Nicoll blogged about cache and JMS related improvements. The goal of this post is to summarize Spring MVC improvements.

The JDK 1.8 java.util.Optional is now supported for @RequestParam, @RequestHeader and @MatrixVariable controller method arguments while ListenableFuture is supported as a return value alternative to DeferredResult where an underlying service (or perhaps a call to AsyncRestTemplate) already returns…

Date: June 18, 2014

Location: Toronto, Canada

WARNING: Audio is not great, but hopefully tolerable :)

Spring Boot, the new convention-over-configuration centric framework from the Spring team at Pivotal, marries Spring's flexibility with conventional, common sense defaults to make application development not just fly, but pleasant! Join Spring developer advocate Josh Long@starbuxman for a look at what Spring Boot is, why it's turning heads, why you should consider it for your next application (REST,web, batch, big-data, integration, whatever!) and how to get started.

Learn more about Spring Boot at: http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot

!{iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ySvuAqtQrUc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen}{/iframe}

This week, Juergen announced the Spring Framework 4.1 release candidate. Now is the time to test those new features and see how they can make your applications better!

One of those new features is the flexible resolution and transformation of static web resources. Spring framework already allows you to serve static resources using ResourceHttpRequestHandlers. This feature gives you more power and new possibilities.

ResourceResolvers and ResourceTransformers

ResourceResolvers and ResourceTransformers are at the very core of this new feature.

ResourceResolvers can resolve resources, given their URL path. They can also resolve the externally facing public URL path for clients to use, given their internal resource path. ResourceTransformers…

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 …

MongoDB officially has offered full text search capabilities since its 2.6 release. The feature ranks among the Top 5 most voted features for the server component and ships in its current version with numerous stemmers and parsers, phrase matching, negation and per field weights. So it's about time to give it a little love and share what's cooking in Spring Data's kitchen to support that feature.

For text indexing and searching MongoDB defaults the language to English, normalizing the text by tokenizing, removing common stop words and reducing words to their base. There's support for several…

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? :-)