Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring! Things are starting to ramp up considerably here on the Spring team. This week, on the 9th, we have the very anticipated Spring 4 release webinar Registration has been crazy! I'll be there, watching and helping to MC. I hope you'll be there too!

Also, if you're in the Bay Area, I'll be speaking at the Oakland JUG on January 22nd for a few hours in an evening we're calling Have You Seen Spring Lately?. We'll look at the epic last year's worth of awesome, including the release of Spring 4, Spring Boot and Spring XD. I hope you'll join us there, too! Bring questions!

1. On Jan 16th, 2014, our Spring Security lead Rob Winch will introduce the Spring Security 3.2 release and talk about it's support for Java Configuration, CSRF Protection, Security Related HTTP response headers, optional Spring MVC integration, and of course, Spring Framework 4.0.
2. Patrick Grimard has put together a nice post on using Spring Security 3.2.0's CSRF protection with a Backbone (or, really, any client-facing application). There is, as Spring Security Rob Winch points out, a simpler still way to achieve this.
3. Feburary is Security month! We've just released a SpringOne2GX 2013 Replay: Data Modelling and Identity Management with OAuth2, with Dr. David Syer..
4. On the REST front, also just released another SpringOne2GX 2013 Replay: Spring RESTBucks - A hypermedia-driven REST webservice, with Oliver Gierke.
5. Roy Clarkson put together a great post on how to use WebJars, which lets you manage client-side dependencies like JavaScript using traditional JVM-based build-management tools like Gradle and Maven, along with Spring Boot.
6. This post - about application instrumentation for logging, is a little old, but I thought it worth mention because it's generally pretty insightful and it demonstrates its concepts in terms of not only the canonical Spring Pet Clinic application, but also the Node.js Node Cellar, and the .NET Music Store. Not bad!
7. Our pal Petri Kainulainen is back! He's written a nice post on how to use the JOOQ typesafe query API with Spring
8. This post has so very little to do with Spring, but it does have to do with GemFire XD (our in-memory, distributed data-store that can work in-memory or with HDFS) and a bit of clever Python tinkering to access GemFire XD from Python.
9. Did you see this epic post on running a Spring Boot-powered web service on a Raspberry Pi?
10. Ned Lowe's put together a nice post on migrating from Spring MVC 2.0-style MVC applications to the annotation-centric approach available since Spring MVC 2.5.
11. Thys Michels has put together a nice post on JUnit testing Spring MVC services.
12. And thanks to the Learning Spring blog for the friendly reminder that Spring applications expose a lot of valuable logging for your exploitation if you simply modify the right configuration files.
13. Tomas Zezula put together a nice post on Spring's @Primary annotation, which lets you disambiguate the choice for which dependency to use from among many possible dependencies.

Welcome to 2014! 2013 was an exciting year for Spring, and we look forward to another great year. We have focused on client-side development in a few recent posts, including that we have published several new client-side getting started guides. In a previous post, I also reviewed how easy it is to serve static web content with Spring Boot.

In this post I will continue the discussion about client-side development with Spring Boot as we explore another built-in capability. My previous post included the following excerpt from the source code for WebMvcAutoConfiguration which illustrates how static resources are automatically added to a Spring MVC ResourceHandlerRegistry…

Happy New Year! Welcome back to this year's final installment of This Week in Spring!

We'll do some of the news, as usual, and then I'll take a look back over the last year in news surrounding Spring, of which there's been much indeed!

1. Matt Raible, who we know has also been looking at Spring Boot, just wrote up our just-released Spring 4 for InfoQ. Definitely worth a read if you have the time!

• Xavier Padró has a nice post on retrying web service operations with RequestHandlerRetryAdvice.
• There's a great discussion on Stack Overflow on Spring's CrudRepository vs. the more JPA-specific JpaRepository with an awesome answer by Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke
• Ken Blair has put together a nice introduction to doing bean mapping using the Orika bean-mapping framework alongside Spring
• Groovy ninja Guillaume LaForge has started putting together a nice roundup of all the latest happenings in the Groovy community, and I'd just like to invite readers of …

Happy holidays! Hopefully with the holiday season comes some time off, and a chance to relax and more fully catch up on fun stuff you missed during a busy year. Readers of this column will know there are many channels for developers learning about Spring, and studying the field of technologies that Spring supports. Don't forget about our SpringSource YouTube page, Twitter account, our 15-30 minute "Getting Started" guides, the blog, and of course our Facebook and Google+ pages. I personally want to go back and watch as many SpringOne2GX talks on the YouTube channel as I can.

1. Remeber JHipster? Julien Dubois's Yeoman-powered code generator for Spring applications? Well, 0.0.6 has been released and it has no required Spring XML (and Java EE's web.xml's the last one!) and provides code-generation support for services.
…

We made a few announcements recently about the Spring getting started guides, including that the catalog of guides have been migrated to Asciidoctor. We also added several new client-side guides illustrating how to connect to Spring services from a variety of client technologies.

In this post I want to highlight an interesting capability of Spring Boot; within many of the client-side guides we utilized Spring Boot to stand up a Tomcat instance and serve static content. In these guides we are demonstrating JavaScript client code, not Java or Groovy! If you are already familiar with Boot, then…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week, well, I'm taking some vacation :) That, of course, means that this week's roundup was even more fun for me - I got to play with the just-released Spring 4! And, to sweeten my vacation, the steady stream of new releases based on Spring 4.0 from the other Spring projects has already started!

If you're using Spring (Spring 4, Spring Boot, and anything else) and have some great new blog, video or sample project you think people should see, don't hesitate to share it with me on Twitter! Matt Raible has already made a helpful blog post: A Webapp Makeover with Spring 4 and Spring Boot where he upgrades his existing Spring 3.2.5, Spring Security 3.1.4 and Jersey 1.18 app to run Spring Framework 4 and Spring Boot.

1. First, the BIG news! Spring CTO Adrian Colyer just announced that Spring 4 has gone GA! If you, like me, have been eagerly awaiting this all year, then don't wait a second longer! Grab those bits as soon as you can. Spring 4, of course, is the first major-version increment since Spring 3.0 back in 2009, and represents a major leap forward for application developers. Join Juergen Hoeller (and many other engineers) on January 9, 2014 for the launch webinar: Introduction to Spring Framework 4.0.
2. Concurrent with the Spring 4 release, we've just added several new guides to the insanely popular Getting Started guides collection. Among the new guides, you'll find help on CORS, jQuery-, Sencha-, Angular.js-integration, and much more!
3. Rob Winch followed very shortly after, announcing that Spring Security 3.2.0 RELEASE is available! Now, I'm going to finally update the code to my talk on using Spring's REST stack, along with Spring Security and Spring Security OAuth, to the new revision! Join Rob on January 16th, 2014 for a talk focused on the new release of Spring Security 3.2.
4. Once Spring 4 was released, Spring Integration lead Gary Russell wasted no time in getting the long-awaited Spring Integration 3.0 out the door! This new release features many new improvements, which were mostly covered in the release candidate announcement.
5. Projects lead Martin Lippert has just announced that Spring Tool Suite and Groovy/Grails Tool Suite 3.5.0.M1 are now available. This update revs to Groovy 2.2, Grails 2.3.4, and tc Server 2.9.4, and advanced content-assist for Spring Boot projects, improved dashboard feeds, and support for the new client-side getting started guides. This cut builds on Eclipse Kepler SR1. Check it out!
6. Spring Data project lead Oliver Gierke has just announced the latest Spring Data release train, Spring Data Babbage SR2, has just been released. The service release bundles a bunch of important enhancements and bug fixes and is a recommended upgrade. You can find all issues fixed in this release in our JIRA
7. Spring ninja Greg Turnquist put together a very nice look at the aforementioned Getting Started guides' migration to Asciidotor, behind the scenes.
8. Spring ninja and Boot co-lead Phil Webb and I did a talk, Improving Your Java Configuration Muscle Memory, for SpringOne2GX 2013, which is now available as a replay on our YouTube channel. Check it out!
9. Patrick Grimard's written a post introducing how to setup a Spring MVC interceptor to handle CORS requests. For more details on the subject of CORS, check out our Understanding CORS page, and then check out our new Getting Started guide which shows a Servlet Filter-centric alternative approach to basically do the same thing. This builds on Spring Boot, and uses a Filter instead of an interceptor, but the effect is the same.
10. Our pal Bozhidar Bozhanov has written a great post all about web sockets, which of course work great with Spring 4!, complete with slides and codes! Be sure to check it out! This post uses a more low level approach to websockets, which Spring also supports, where all messages get funneled through one handler. Me personally, I like using the higher level STOMP support to avoid having to funnel all requests through the same handler, and then picking each request apart with a switch statement. Either way, this is a great post and - because it's lower level - gives you a better understanding of what's happening underneath the hood. Check it out!
11. With a new release comes updated Maven artifacts. Last week, I mentioned that Spring 4 now features a very handy bill of materials Maven pom.xml. You should use that to simplify things. Additionally, if you're a BinTray user, be aware that the new release is already available there, as well.

Dear Spring Community,

At SpringOne, we launched a brand new Spring web site, including a collection of Getting Started Guides. These quick-hit guides are proving very popular as they get right to the point on how to use Spring to address several common tasks such as caching, messaging, and integration.

We are very pleased to announce the addition of several new Getting Started Guides that present Spring as providing services that back rich and mobile clients developed in Backbone, AngularJS, iOS, and other client-side frameworks and platforms. These guides include:

• Consuming a RESTful Web Service with AngularJS
• Consuming a RESTful Web Service with jQuery
• Consuming a RESTful Web Service with rest.js
• Consuming a RESTful Web Service with Sencha Touch
• Consuming a RESTful Web Service with Backbone.js
• Consuming a RESTful Web Service from iOS
• Consuming a RESTful Web Service with Spring for Android
• Building a RESTful Web Service with CORS
• Messaging with STOMP over WebSocket
• Using WebSocket and msgs.js to build an interactive web application
…

"If Markdown is a 1st-grader, then AsciiDoc is a PhD student."[sic] -- Dan Allen, project lead of AsciiDoctor

We recently migrated all of our Getting Started Guides to Asciidoctor. Why? Because Asciidoctor provides so many valuable features!

• Several built in directives make it possible to pull in entire code files, small fragments of code, and external chunks of reusable content.
• Rendering is now embedded into spring.io's website.
• No need to "generate" the guide, which always puts you at risk of being out of sync with the code, the build files, and the document itself.
• Lines up with how many of our projects are migrating away from DocBook towards AsciiDoctor to reduce maintenance.
…

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! This week I'm going to be in Los Angeles, talking to developers at Disney about Spring. If you're in the area, I'd love to see you all there, too. We're hosting a user-group meeting on December 11th. Here are some details on the event, which takes place tomorrow! I look forward to seeing you there!

Can you believe we're already staring down the end of the year? @_@

That means it's time for the annual release of Spring Framework, 4.0! We look forward to your feedback on the release.

1. Don't miss the Spring Framework 4.0 launch webinar, "Introduction to Spring Framework 4.0", with none other than Juergen Hoeller, on Jan 9th, 2014, first major Spring Framework release since 2009!
2. Be sure to check out the webinar by busiest guy in code-business and Spring Security lead Rob Winch on Jan 16, 2014 to hear about Spring Security 3.2.
3. Spring Framework committer and co-lead of Spring Boot Phil Webb introduces Spring 4's new support for Java generics in Spring 4.
4. Thomas Darimont introduces what's new in Spring Data MongoDB 1.4 M1, including the phenomenal new projection framework and SpEL integration.
5. If you're a user of the Spring-powered Broadleaf e-commerce engine, then you might want to register for the v3.1 web event.
6. Our pal Tobias Flohre is back with yet another awesome post, Batch processing and the Java Enterprise Edition (JSR-352, JEE7, Spring Batch). The title speaks for itself - its a good quick overview of where the technologies sit.
7. And, Petri Kainulainen is back at it again with an awesome followup to his series on adding social features to a Spring MVC Web Application with Spring Social. This post is on unit testing that integration.
8. The @GoPivotal blog has an interesting case study of RabbitMQ's deployment at Norwegian Broadcast corporation.

9. Speaking of Phil Webb and Rob Winch, one of the amazing things included in last week's announcement of Spring Framework RC2 was their wonderful addition of a "bill of materials" Maven POM: spring-framework-bom. Use it like this:

   <dependencyManagement>
       <dependencies>
           <dependency>
               <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
               <artifactId>spring-framework-bom</artifactId>
               <version>4.0.0.RC2</version>
               <type>pom</type>
               <scope>import</scope>
           </dependency>
       </dependencies>
   </dependencyManagement>
   

   Then, simply import the version of the Spring dependency that you want without specifying the version in your pom.xml.

10. There's another case study on the GoPivotal blog, this on now Hulu scaled serving 4 billion videos using Redis. That's awesome!

11. Sudhir Dharmadhikari put together an interesting post on using Spring Roo's aspect approach the AndroMDA project
12. Bozhidar Bozhanov, who I loved getting to see again last week in Sofia, has moved the Spring Social Google+ code to GitHub.
13. 

Last but not least, It's Pivotal day at Manning!  

All Spring and Groovy books half price on special deal days, to celebrate the Spring Framework 4.0 launch, Pivotal is sponsoring Spring and Groovy day in Manning's Countdown to 2014! On certain deal days like Monday Dec 9,10; Thursday Dec 12, 13; Monday Dec 23, 24; and Thursday Dec 26, 27, you can get any of Manning's Spring and Groovy books for half off-eBook, pBook, or MEAP. Just go to Manning.com and choose any (or all) of these selected books. Enter gpivdotd13 in the Promotional Code box when you check out to get the discount. BONUS: If you register for Manning's Countdown to 2014, you'll have a chance to win one of two eBooks given…