By Jason Weathersby and Josh Long

Introduction

Developers use BIRT to build and deploy reports in a Java/Java EE environment. In BIRT 3.7, a new POJO-based runtime environment is available that makes deployment of the BIRT engine much simpler. This article discusses several BIRT integration scenarios that use components from the Spring Framework.

The BIRT project includes the following key components:

• BIRT Designer - The developer tool used to design reports.
• Web Viewer - A sample Java web application used to deploy reports. This viewer contains a JSP-tag library that facilitates integration with existing web applications.
• BIRT Engines - The Design and Report engines used to construct, run, and render a BIRT report.
• BIRT Charts - A package that supports building and running highly sophisticated interactive charts.

The Spring framework is a popular collection of architectural and implementation approaches that makes enterprise Java development easier. Core parts of this framework are Dependency Injection and…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring .

We are already almost done with January (which, honestly, shocks me. Where <EM>does</EM> the time go?)
</P> 
<OL> 
	<LI> Did you guys see last week's webinar introducing Spring 3.1 with Spring project lead, and VMWare/SpringSource Principal Engineer, Juergen Hoeller?  
       Last week's webinar was <EM>very</EM> well-attended, and represents the best turnout yet, by far, for all of the SpringSource webinars. So, thanks to all those who came, and, to the handful of people on earth that couldn't make it, don't worry! You can watch 

the Spring 3.1 webinar's recording on the SpringSource YouTube page…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. We've got a lot of good content to look at this week, so let's get on with it.

1. Pssst. What are you guys doing this Thursday, the 19th? If you haven't already, may I suggest you register for the Spring 3.1 webinar with Juergen Hoeller and Chris Beams?

   		If you're in Europe,  there's going to be a  webinar  at <a href = "https://vmwareevents.webex.com/vmwareevents/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=663415641">3PM GMT, or 4PM CEST</a>, and if you're in North America, there's going to be a webinar at <a href = "https://vmwareevents.webex.com/vmwareevents/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=668718779">1PM EST or 10AM PST</a>. 
   		 Don't be left out, this event's already seen the highest registration of any webinar thus far, so register now, and as usual, I hope to see you there. 
   		   </LI>
   
   	<LI> Another session from SpringOne2GX, on <a href = "http://www.springsource.org…

 Welcome back to another installment of <EM>This Week in Spring</EM>! 
There's a lot to cover, so let's dive into it! 
</p>
<OL>
	<LI>  Always eager to help ring in the new year properly, Mark Fisher announced the <a href  = "http://blog.springsource.org/2012/01/09/spring-integration-2-1-is-now-ga/">Spring Integration 2.1 GA</a> yesterday.   
		 The new release has <EM>everything</EM>, and then some! It features new or revised support for a broad spectrum of technologies including AMQP, JDBC, GemFire, MongoDB, Redis, and much, much more. 
		</LI>
		
		<LI>Andy Clement and Martin Lippert's <a…

Spring Integration 2.1 has been released! You can download it here or configure your Maven POM. This version is the result of more than one full year of work, and the team has resolved hundreds of issues since Spring Integration 2.0 was released. Interestingly, it has been 4 years and a few days since the very first public release of Spring Integration (0.5, released on Jan 3rd 2008). In this post, I simply want to provide a quick overview of the main new features of 2.1.

RabbitMQ/AMQP support

In the 'spring-integration-amqp' module, we have Channel Adapters for one-way messaging as well as Gateways for request/reply. The adapters and gateways can be used for inbound and/or outbound integration with a RabbitMQ broker. We also have AMQP-backed Message Channel implementations - both point-to-point and publish/subscribe - that can be used anywhere in the middle of a flow. For more information, see this section…

Happy new year! I hope your new year and holidays were amazing. And, welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring.

This year is going to be <EM>incredible</EM>, so let's dive right into it.  



This week's  roundup features some content from the last few weeks. Particularly, we've got content that InfoQ   put up     
from the <a href = "http://www.springone2gx.com">SpringOne2GX 2011</a> conference.  

Thank you InfoQ for sharing this great content, as usual.

1. Garry Russel and David Turanski's SpringOne2GX presentation on implementing highly available architectures using Spring Integration is now up on InfoQ.

<LI> Rob Winch demoes some of the <A href = "http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Spring-Security-3-1">new features in Spring Security 3.1</a>: multiple http elements, stateless authentication mode for RESTful services, Debug Filter, CAS support for…

Today we're happy to announce that the Spring Framework has moved to GitHub!

As you've probably noticed, nearly every other Spring project has already made the move, and those that haven't will soon.

Git helps us with many of the challenges of managing a large codebase like the Spring Framework, but what's most exciting is what GitHub means for the Spring community. Many readers will already know the virtues of watching and forking repositories, pull requests, forking and editing, and the many other features that GitHub adds to the already excellent world of Git. If you're new to this stuff, be sure to check out the great materials at help.github.com…

<IMG src = "http://www.springsource.org/files/rod-holidays.png" width = "300" style = " float : right;  margin-left : 10px;  " />
	<P> 
		Well, it's that time of the year again!  

The holiday season is upon us and many people will be celebrating! No matter what holiday you're celebrating (or if you're celebrating at all), let me wish you a wonderful week and the happiest of holidays.
To tide you over we've packed this week's roundup to the brim.
Enjoy!

1. Santa's elves could learn a thing or two from the SpringSource engineers! Alan Stewart announced Spring Roo 1.2.0 GA on Saturday. This version of Roo has caught the attention of a lot of people. While there are many new features, some of my favorites are the multi-module Maven project support (which lets you, for example, build your model classes in a separate project from your web application), support JSF / PrimeFaces scaffolding (as opposed to just GWT, Spring MVC, Vaadin, and Flex), support for services / repositories (using Spring Data JPA and Spring Data MongoDB; this is in addition to the Active record style data-access objects…

Amidst the flurry of Spring releases this month, Spring Python has it's own.

Versions 1.1.1 and 1.2.1 are maintenance releases that patch some bugs. Version 1.3.0.RC1 is the first release of 1.3.0.

In this release we have commits from team members, and have also merged pull requests through github. If you want to make contributions to this project, don't forget to sign the contributor license agreement.

Thanks,

The Spring Python team

Release Notes - Version 1.1.1

• [SESPRINGPYTHONPY-134] - AOPProxy throws an error unless target.__class__.__name__ == "instance"
• [SESPRINGPYTHONPY-151] - Fix XML parsing to handle non-ascii values
• [SESPRINGPYTHONPY-159] - Add DatabaseTemplate argument checks to execute that are like the ones used in query operation.
• [SESPRINGPYTHONPY-161] - Add installation steps to Spring Python's documentation

Release Notes - Version 1.2.1

• [SESPRINGPYTHONPY-159] - Add DatabaseTemplate argument checks to execute that are like the ones used in query operations
• [SESPRINGPYTHONPY-161] - Add installation steps to Spring Python's documentation

Release Notes - Version 1.3.0.RC1

• [SESPRINGPYTHONPY-159] - Add DatabaseTemplate argument checks to execute that are like the ones used in query operations
• [SESPRINGPYTHONPY-161] - Add installation steps to Spring Python's documentation