Egads! Can you believe it's already almost the end of the year? Time has been screaming fast! It's the week of Thanksgiving for those of us in the United States. This is a wonderful time of year to sit back, find a nice Spring IO guide or blog to read, and then build something awesome.. oh, and it's an ideal time to spend in the company of friends and family and to reflect on those and that for which we're grateful. I'm sure I speak for the Spring team and Pivotal at large when I say that we're grateful for you, our inspiring community, users and customers.

But if you do want something to read…

Dear Spring Community!

Just after the Spring Integration Java DSL 1.0 GA release announcement I want to introduce the Spring Integration Java DSL to you as a line by line tutorial based on the classic Cafe Demo integration sample. We describe here Spring Boot support, Spring Framework Java and Annotation configuration, the IntegrationFlow feature and pay tribute to Java 8 Lambda support which was an inspiration for the DSL style. Of course, it is all backed by the Spring Integration Core project.

For those, who are not interested in Java 8 yet, we provide similar tutorial without Lambdas: Spring Integration Java DSL (pre Java 8): Line by line tutorial…

In this blog, I want to look at - and demonstrate - some of the many new features in Spring Boot 1.2 that make the lives of those coming from, or otherwise building on, Java EE easier.

It's worth mentioning that a lot of this support has been possible with Spring before, of course, but now with Spring Boot 1.2, it's just so darned easy!

First, here's an example program with notes after.

package demo;

import org.glassfish.jersey.jackson.JacksonFeature;
import org.glassfish.jersey.server.ResourceConfig;
import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot…

Recently, a friend of mine tweeted out a challenge:

"Name a framework in which you can create a new app expose a REST service with a database and deploy it to the cloud in five minutes. #grails"

The moment I spotted that tweet, I responded, "Spring Boot + Spring Data REST"! I realized he was kindly pointing out how easy it is to build RESTful services with Grails (a great framework). But I couldn't resist showing the ease and power of Spring Data REST.

To prove my point, I couldn't resisting crafting a screencast. In the linked screencast, I show how über easy Spring has made it to pick the parts for your app from http://start.spring.io, define your domain, and then…

On behalf of the Spring XD team, I am very pleased to announce the first milestone release of Spring XD 1.1 and the 1.0.2 maintenance release.

Download Links:

• 1.0.2.RELEASE: zip, 1.1.0.M1 RELEASE: zip

In addition to bug fixes, Spring XD 1.0.2 now supports Apache Hadoop 2.5.1. Pivotal PHD 2.1 and Cloudera CDH 5.1.3.

The 1.1 M1 release includes bug fixes and enhancements as well as several new features:

• Run a Spark Application as a batch job
• Python based processors and sinks
• Kafka source and sink
• HDFS sink supports writing to a Kerberized Hadoop Cluster
• LDAP Authentication
• Modules can be created using Java @Configuration classes as an alternative to XML
• Redis sink and JDBC Source
• Hadoop distribution updates. Support for Apache Hadoop 2,4.1/2.5.1 (default), Pivotal PHD 2.0/2.1, Cloudera CDH 5.2, and Hortonworks HDP 2.1. Apache Hadoop 2.2 support was removed
• Configurable location of Spring XD’s top level node in Zookeeper
…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in sunny Sofia, Bulgaria for the Java2Days software conference. As usual, this show is way too much fun and the crowd's bigger and better than ever!

1. Spring Boot 1.2.0 RC1 is now available! This release moves embedded Servlet containers to Tomcat 8 or Jetty 9, adds a new @SpringBootApplication annotation, adds JavaMail support, and registers additional Spring Boot actuator support
2. Spring Session 1.0.0.RC1 is here with loads of features!
3. Speaking of using Spring with ZeroTurnaround, join ZeroTurnaround's Adam Koblentz and I on Nov 20th as we look at using JRebel and Spring Boot to deliver a one-two developer productivity punch without equal
4. Want to learn more about the Reactor project and the role of asych I/O in microservices? Check out the upcoming Reactor webinar…

By Josh Long

Spring Integration 4.1 was just released and it includes a lot of great new features! One of my favorites? Smart integration with the Spring 4 WebSocket support. Now you can compose a integration flow whose final destination is a WebSocket client. There is also support for acting as the client to a WebSocket service.

In order to compile it, you will need Java 8 (we make heavy use of lambdas here) and the following Maven dependencies:

• groupId:org.springframework.integration, artifactId:spring-integration-java-dsl, version: 1.0.0.RC1.
• groupId:org.springframework.integration, artifactId:spring-integration-websocket, version: 4.1.0.RELEASE.
• groupId:org.springframework.boot, artifactId:spring-boot-starter-websocket, version: 1.2.0.RC1.
…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm back in Silicon Valley, talking to developers at a handful of large technology-driven companies about taking their first steps with a cloud-native architecture. Interesting feedback, as ever! This week I'll be doing a meetup here in the bay area on building Bootiful microservices with Spring Cloud. Next week, I look forward to seeing people at Java2Days in Sofia, Bulgaria! C'ya there!

1. Spring Integration lead Gary Russell has just announced Spring Integration 4.1.0 and Spring AMQP 1.4.0 final are now available!

• Spring Security OAuth 2.0.4.RELEASE Available Now. The new release contains a few nice additions and a few bug fixes, making it a recommended, easy upgrade.
• Spring lead Juergen Hoeller just announced the availability of Spring Framework 4.1.2, accompanied by 4.0.8 and 3.2.12 maintenance releases.
• I'll be doing a webinar with ZeroTurnaround's Adam Koblentz introducing how to use Spring (and Spring Boot in particular) and JRebel 6…

Sometimes, teh Twitterz is an amazing place. Just last week I spent some time helping clarify the behavior of Spring's @Qualifier annotation, which is both older than JSR 330 and offers a richer superset of JSR 330's @Qualifier annotation. These misguided few seemed to be under the impression that Spring's annotation didn't offer the same degree of type-safety as the JSR 330 annotation. I don't know if it's because they simply hadn't read up on the support (which is fairly new, since it's only been around since 2007), or if it's because they work for companies that make their money if you…