Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring. This week is the last chance to sign up for the SpringOne on the Road events in London, Kiev and Moscow so be sure to register. Let's dive into it!

1. Chris Richardson's webinar recording on NoSQL options for the Java developer is online in the SpringSourceDev YouTube Channel.
2. Shekhar Gulati's excellent introduction to Spring Roo continues over on IBM's developerWorks portal. The latest installment introduces writing advanced (and wrapper) Spring Roo addons.

<LI>  This article, which introduces how to use <a href = "http://java.dzone.com/articles/use-javafx2-spring">Spring to assemble  JavaFX 2 components</a> is short and to the point.  I'd probably use Spring's Java configuration option to fully exploit all the custom components, however. The nice thing about the approach outlined (over using FXML, directly, is that beans configured this way benefit from all the services that Spring provides, including dependency injection and AOP). Nice post, Andy!  </LI>

<LI>Blogger <EM>Rob Gordon</EM> has a nice post introducing <a href ="http://rgordon.co…

What a great week! The Cloud Foundry Open Tour's well under way, having just finished the Asian and US legs of the tour. Now, onward to Europe! (If you're in Europe, now's the time to secure your spot!)

Before we continue on to the bevy of the latest and greatest content, I wanted to remind you guys to check out Spring Integration ninja Oleg Zhurakousky's upcoming webinar, Practical Tips for Spring Integration. There is, as usual, one event for North America, and one for Europe

1. Gunnar Hillert's put together a blog introducing a feature that's received a lot of attention in SpringSource Tool Suite: easy-to-use templates for creating Spring Integration projects. Nice job, Gunnar! Also, check out Gunnar's accompanying video Create Spring Integration Projects with STS on the SpringSource YouTube channel.
2. Michael Isvy has put together a great blog explaining a few of the things you should be aware of when upgrading to Spring 3.1. Handy!

 <LI> Spring Integration 2.1.1 has been released! This is the first maintenance release of 2.1.x branch and contains the usual things like bug fixes and improvements related to AMQP, Gemfire, Mongo and Redis modules which were first introduced in Spring Integration 2.1.0. All together 56 issues were resolved with this release. 
	 For more, consult <a href = "http://www.springsource.org/node/3520">the release announcement</A>.</LI>
		
<LI>  Gabriel Axel talks about the <a href = "http://www.gabiaxel.com/2012/04/spring-social-google-first-milestone-is.html">first milestone of Spring Social…

Just days ago, SpringSource Tool Suite™ (STS) 2.9.1 was released. Besides many new features, it provides several features that are especially exciting for Spring Integration users. First of all, the latest STS release adds support for Spring Integration 2.1 and improves the visualization capabilities for Spring Integration flows. STS supports now all recently added Spring Integration adapters such as:

• Redis
• Gemfire
• AMQP
• Stored Procedure

Also, all existing Spring Integration adapters have been updated to support new visualization elements. Another wonderful addition to Spring Integration users is that SpringSource Tool Suite 2.9.x now ships with templating support for Spring Integration. Thus, when creating a new project using the Spring Template Project Wizard, you can now select between the following 3 new Spring Integration targeted templates:

• Spring Integration Project (Standalone) - Simple
• Spring Integration Project (Standalone) - File
• Spring Integration Project (War)

The Simple template creates a basic Spring Integration project, which runs as a standalone Java application, using only core Spring Integration components. In order to illustrate File polling capabilities, the File template uses additional components to poll file directories as well as to route those files. Lastly, the War template allows users to easily create basic Spring Integration projects that are targeted to run within servlet containers (e.g. Tomcat) as part of a WAR deployment. For illustration purposes the War template uses the Spring Integration Twitter adapter.

Creating a new Spring Integration Project

In order to start a new project using STS Spring Templates, go in the main menu to File, then NEW and then Spring Template Project. The Template Selection Screen will show up next.

 

[caption id="attachment_10681" align="aligncenter" width="342" caption="The Template Selection Screen"][/caption]

This screen provides a list of all available Spring Templates, including the 3 previously mentioned new templates for Spring Integration. If you see that little arrow in front of the template name - that means that the actual template has not been downloaded, yet. Once downloaded, the Templates will be cached on your machine and you won’t need to download the template files again, unless you press the Refresh…

Welcome to another Installment of This Week in Spring The Cloud Foundry Open Tour is well underway, and have been thus far very good events to attract community.

There are still some (well, there were yesterday!) early bird spots in the upcoming shows in <a href = "http://opentour.cloudfoundry.com/2012/austin">Austin</A>, <a href = "http://opentour.cloudfoundry.com/2012/washington">Washington D.C.</a>, <a href = "http://opentour.cloudfoundry.com/2012/kiev">Kiev</A>, <a href = "http://opentour.cloudfoundry.com/2012/moscow">Moscow</A>, and <a href  = "http://opentour.cloudfoundry.com/2012/london">London</A>, so book now. 

1. Some of the wonderful content from the Spring I/O conference is now available online! The conference, held in Spain in February of this year, is conducted in both Spanish and English, so there's a lot to like no matter which language you speak. Adrian Colyer's keynote session is super, once you get past the audio problems at the beginning. I couldn't find a SpringIO-specific hash tag, but you can pick them out of the other videos pretty easily by scrolling down. Stay tuned, there should be even more content posted, soon.

 <LI> Tobias Fiohre (who  seemingly lives  <EM>only</Em> to please us, the lucky developers in the  Spring community!)  has put up…

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring. As usual, we have a lot to cover. As this post goes up, the Cloud Foundry Open Tour is underway in Beijing, and coming to a city near you, soon. This show's a very unique opportunity to learn more about Cloud Foundry and Spring from the experts - don't miss out, register today.

1. Spring web dude Rossen Stoyanchev announced that Spring Web Flow 2.3.1 has been released. This is a maintenance release featuring an upgrade to Spring 3.1.1, and JavaServer Faces 2.1.7 along with a number of bug fixes.
2. SpringSource Tool Suite lead Martin Lippert announced the release of the Cloud Foundry Integration for Eclipse 1.0. This release brings a complete, cohesive Cloud Foundry integration for all Eclipse distributions, including the SpringSource Tool Suite.
3. Martin also announced the release of SpringSource Tool Suite release, 2.9.1, featuring new features and bug fixes.

<LI>    <a href = "http://www.springone2gx.com/conference/speaker/mark_fisher">Mark Fisher</A> and <a href = "http://www.springone2gx.com/conference/speaker/thomas_risberg">Thomas Risberg</A>'s epic talk from <a href = "http://www.springone2gx.com">SpringOne 2GX 2011</A>  - <EM><A href = "http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Architecture-Choices-for-Scalable-Cloud-Apps">Architecture Choices for Scalable Cloud Apps</A></EM> -  that introduces how to build scalable architectures in the cloud using technologies like Spring Integration and Cloud Foundry is now up on InfoQ. 
	  </LI>
	

4. Maciej Walkowiak has a blog that introduces how to use Spring 3.1 profiles in conjunction with some custom Tomcat configuration to activate Spring profiles without changing the deployed binary.
5. Michal Jastak has put together a wonderful post introducing how to use Spring MVC 3.1's support for flash attributes.
6. Tobias Flohre is at it again, this time with two posts on Spring Batch. The first post introduces the basics of transactions in Spring Batch, and the second post introduces some of the finer points of restarting cursor-based readers and writers.

    </LI> 
   

7. Artur Mkrtchyan has a great post introducing both how to install Redis (a fast, highly optimized data-structure server) and how to use Spring Data Redis (part of the Spring Data umbrella project that facilitates access to the wide varieties of so-called NoSQL and big-data stores) to build Spring applications that talk to Redis.
…

Introduction

The Grails Framework provides a lot of tools and techniques to web application developers to simplify solving common application development challenges.

Among those are a number of things which simplify the complicated and tedious problems often associated with data binding. In general, data binding is made very simple by Grails as it offers several techniques for binding maps of data to graphs of objects.

It is important that application developers understand the implications of each of those techniques in order to decide which is most appropriate and most secure for any given use case.

Web Application Data Binding Overview

A really common task for many web applications is for the application to accept a set of http request parameters and bind those parameters to an object. The object then might be stored in the database, used to perform some kind of calculation or used carry out some kind of application logic. In a Grails application some of that is often carried out in a controller action and the data is often being bound to a domain object.

Consider a domain class which looks something like this:

Code Listing 1

class Employee {
    String firstName
    String lastName
    BigDecimal salary
}

There might be…

Hello and welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As usual, we've got some great stuff to look at, so let's get to it.

1. 	Want to use SpringSource Tool Suite on the <a href = "http://blog.springsource.org/2012/03/14/early-access-springsource-tool-suite-for-eclipse-juno-4-2/">latest Eclipse Juno (4.2) milestone builds</A>? 
   	SpringSource Tool Suite lead Martin Lippert has got the answer for you.
   	  </LI>
   
   
   <LI> Michal Borek  has a great blog post on how to use the <a href = "http://www.greenpath.pl/2012/03/spring-framework-and-file-upload/"><CODE>ConversionService</CODE> in Spring 3.0+ to convert uploaded file data into a domain object</A>. First, this is a <EM>really</EM> cool idea. Second, users should be…

Wanna use the SpringSource Tool Suite on the latest Eclipse Juno (4.2) milestone builds? Here you go: 

How to install

• Download and install the latest: Eclipse Juno JEE milestone build
• Download the bookmarks.xml and import that to your list of update sites (Preferences -> Install/Update -> Available Update Sites -> Import).
• Go to "Install New Software" and select SpringSource Tool Suite for Eclipse 4.2: http://dist.springsource.com/snapshot/TOOLS/nightly/e4.2.
• Select the components you would like to use and install.
• Restart and use STS on Eclipse 4.2.

The necessary dependencies for STS are all available from the composite update site: http://dist.springsource.com/snapshot/TOOLS/composite/e4.2, if you wanna add something manually.

Managing update sites yourself

Here are the individual update sites from which you can install STS, AJDT and Groovy-Eclipse for Juno (4.2):

• http://dist.springsource.com/snapshot/TOOLS/nightly/e4.2
• http://dist.springsource.org/snapshot/GRECLIPSE/e4.2/
• http://download.eclipse.org/tools/ajdt/37/dev/update/

Known limitations

Since the Eclipse Juno distribution is based on the Eclipse 4.x stream, you will notice quite some changes on the UI when starting the latest Eclipse Juno builds. And we haven't yet adapted to all changes, therefore the Maven support of STS (for example) is not yet working. If you observe anything else, please let us know.

Feedback

This is an early access version of STS that is continually updated by our CI servers. If you observe problems running STS on top of your Eclipse Juno (4.2) M5 (or later) installation, please let us know and report issues to: https://issuetracker.springsource.com/browse/STS. Since we are planning towards a distribution on top of Eclipse Juno for STS 3.0, we would be very happy to hear your opinion about that and gather feedback as early as possible.

Outlook

We are planning towards an STS 3.0 release right after the Eclipse Juno release in July 2012, providing ready-to-go-distributions of STS based on Eclipse Juno.

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. There is a lot to look at this week with much of the excitement around the just released Spring for Apache Hadoop project, which provides a very, very powerful Spring API integration for Apache Hadoop, an open source framework originally designed to support map-reduce style batch processing solutions.

</P> 

1. Costin Leau kicked things off with the announcement of Spring for Apache Hadoop 1.0.0.M1 last week. I can't explain it any better than Costin does, so I won't bother. From his post:

   Whether one is writing stand-alone, vanilla MapReduce applications, interacting with data from multiple data stores across the enterprise, or coordinating a complex workflow of HDFS, Pig, or Hive jobs, or anything in between, Spring for Apache Hadoop stays true to the Spring philosophy offering a simplified programming model and addresses "accidental complexity" caused by the infrastructure.

   What are you waiting for? Go! Check it out! When you're done, you might check out the other coverage of the event, as well. As you might expect, a lot of people blogged about it, too.

   	 </LI> 
   <LI> What are you guys doing in two days, on March 8th, 2012? I'll be at the Native Android Development with Spring for Android webinar that introduces native Android development practices, resource management and the Spring for Android integration library, which makes the whole process more natural for developers that wish to interface with services on the server side. 
   	 There are, as usual, two editions, one <a href= "http://www.springsource.org/node/3482">for North America</A> and <a href = "http://www.springsource.org/node/3481">one for Europe</A>. Don't miss it! 
   	</LI…