Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the first milestone release 3.6.0.M1 of the Spring Tool Suite (STS) and the Groovy/Grails Tool Suite (GGTS).

Highlights from this milestone build include:

• based on Eclipse Luna 4.4
• support for Groovy 2.3
• updated to Grails 2.4
• updated to tc Server 2.9.6
• minor improvements to the Gradle tooling
• bugfixes, including fixes for endless build loops and memory leaks

To download the distributions, please go visit:

• Spring Tool Suite: https://spring.io/tools/sts/all
• Groovy/Grails Tool Suite: https://spring.io/tools/ggts/all

Detailed new and noteworthy notes can be found here: STS/GGTS 3.6.0.M1 New & Noteworthy.

NOTE: Both tool suites ship on top of the latest Eclipse Luna 4.4 release candidates as 64bit based zip files ONLY. We plan to no longer ship installers and 32bit distributions anymore. Update sites will be available for use with older Eclipse versions and 32bit installations.

We are very keen to hear any feedback on this change.

The 3.6.…

Today we are pleased to announce the release of Spring Batch 3.0. This release of Spring Batch provides support for JSR-352 - we are committed to providing that support, as well as a number of new features for our existing Spring Batch community.

Features in Spring Batch 3.0

The major features for this release include:

• JSR-352 support
• Promotion of Spring Batch Integration into Spring Batch
• Complete overhaul of dependencies
• Support for SQLite
• Job scope
• Removal of "archetypes" in favor of Spring Boot
• Switch from Maven to Gradle for building Spring Batch

JSR-352 Support

Providing one of the most important new features in JEE7, JSR-352 brings standardization of batch processing to the java stack. The Spring team not only provided extensive input into the spec with two team members on the expert group, but Spring Batch served as the inspiration for most of the programming model. Spring Batch 3.0 continues the Spring commitment to JSR-352 by providing the most production tested code base to implement this specification.

It's important to note the differences between JSR-352 and Spring Batch. JSR-352 provides three things:

• An API for building batch components
• An XML based DSL for configuring batch components
• A contract of how batch components interact

JSR-352 does not provide any implementations of batch components. Spring Batch provides 17 readers, 16 writers and countless other utilities and extensions that have been tested for years in enterprise production environments. Spring Batch provides scalability options beyond a single JVM. Finally Spring Batch provides big data support both through the Spring for Apache Hadoop project and as a cornerstone of Spring XD.

To read more about Spring Batch's implementation of JSR-352, visit our reference documentation here: http://docs.spring.io/spring-batch/trunk/reference/html/jsr-352.html

Promote Spring Batch Integration to Spring Batch

From the outside looking in, it can be confusing to determine when to use Spring Batch and when to use Spring Integration. To be truthful, there isn't always a solid either/or answer. In many cases, the combination of the two technologies is the best option to provide robust, scalable solutions. This is why Spring Batch Integration was developed. A collection of Spring Batch extensions, this module allows developers to use Spring Integration to extend the power of Spring Batch. Functionality like multi-JVM scalability and message driven job launching are provided with no custom code and minimal configuration with this module.

The functionality provided in Spring Batch Integration extend batch processing beyond what JSR-352 provides capabilities to provide robust, enterprise grade solutions. You can read more about Spring Batch Integration and it's components in the reference documentation here: http://docs.spring.io/spring-batch/trunk/reference/html/springBatchIntegration.html.

Complete overhaul of dependencies

As part of an ongoing effort across the Spring portfolio, the Spring Batch third party dependencies have been updated. This allows users of Spring Batch to use the latest and greatest of the libraries they trust with Spring Batch.

Support for SQLite

Most integration test scenarios use HSQLDB as a datasource due to its ability to easily create in-memory databases. However, there are times when a simple, single file, option would be nicer. For that reason, we have added SQLite as a supported database for the Spring Batch repository.

Job scope

Spring Batch provides two custom bean scopes. The first, step scope, has been around for years as a way to delay bean initialization until the step the bean is used by is executed. With Spring Batch 3.0, we've added a job scope. This will allow the ability to lazily initialize job level components (JobExecutionListeners for example) as well as provide functionality like job parameter injection to those components. You can read more about the job scope in the reference manual here: http://docs.spring.io/spring-batch/trunk/reference/html/configureStep.html#job-scope.

Removal of "archetypes" in favor of Spring Boot

Spring Batch has traditionally provided a sample maven project as a way to bootstrap a Spring Batch project. With Spring Boot, we've removed those projects in favor of using the dynamic bootstrapping capabilities that Spring Boot provides. We believe that Boot provides a far superior option to what the old "archetypes" provided.

Move from Maven to Gradle

Finally, this release is the first for Spring Batch to move from Maven to Gradle for an internal build system. This change will have zero effect on developers consuming the jars. They will still be available via Maven Central for maven users.

Looking forward

With this release, we look forward to planning and developing our 3.1 release. The 3.1 release will have two major themes: simplification and supporting the Spring XD efforts.

For the simplification side, we want to improve the usability of Spring Batch to a point where it can be considered for less "heavy" processes. By focusing here, it allows developers to "grow" a solution. Many times things that start out as simple scripts and evolve into processes enterprises need to lean on for mission critical functionality. We want Spring Batch to be a consideration at the script stage so that when that functionality needs an enterprise grade solution, it's already there.

Beyond core Spring Batch functionality, Spring Batch serves as a core technology for Spring XD. We will continue to expand Spring Batch's capabilities to support big data solutions through Spring XD and Spring for Apache Hadoop.

Conclusion

3.0.0 represents the completion of the next major milestone for Spring Batch. It brings the standards that JSR-352 provides to our community as well as providing an exhaustive collection of additional features for the advanced user. We look forward to your feedback in the forums, social media, and in person at SpringOne2GX!

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! Here in the States we had a 3-day weekend, which was nice. Good chance to watch some of those amazing tech talks! If you're like me, you've run out of tech talks, and will be glad to see that we have a lot more going up today!

1. Grails project lead Graeme Rocher just announced Grails 2.4! The new release is amazing for a slew of reasons, not the least of which is that some of its many amazing features are easy to use with Spring Boot, too. Double win! Congratulations, Graeme and team. (And also thank you, for another amazing release!)
2. Spring Boot 1.1.0.M2 is now available! The new release features improved support for Spring Data Solr, Spring Data Gemfire, and the entire Spring Data Dijkstra release train. The new release also offers GSP (Groovy Server Pages) and Velocity as templating options, along with upgrades to various libraries like Spring Security 3.2.4, and Spring Batch 3.0. This release train is moving quickly, so jump onboard while you can! There's a lot more great stuff, so check out the release notes.
3. June webinars are here! Ramnivas Laddad on launches Spring Cloud on June 3rd in Abstracting PaaS services to be portable with Spring Cloud, Michael Minella in Spring Batch 3.0.0 on June 10th, and Glenn Renfro in Spring Integration Done Boot-ifully on June 17th.
4. This blog introduces some of the limitations of Hibernate's inbuilt JDBC logging and then introduces log4jdbc as used in a simple Spring / Hibernate application.
5. Our pal Eugen Paraschiv has put together a very nice introduction to Spring Data JPA.
6. Matti Tahvonen over on the Vaadin team put together this fantastic introduction to using Spring Data Neo4j, Spring Boot, and of course the Vaadin4Spring library that Petter Holmström and I started. To be fair, it's only usable because of Petter :) So usable, in fact, that Matti was able to put together something beautiful - Bootiful - very quickly. Check it out! The application models (and visualizes!) data stored in Neo4j, so it's not just any old CRUD application, this is very cool!
7. CloudFoundry ninja James Bayer announced the new Pivotal CF 1.2, which now supports VMWare's Hybrid Cloud Service, initial auditing and autoscaling, new data services (Redis, MongoDB, Neo4j, RiakCS, and ElasticSearch are all available!), and a lot more!
8. Curiousity piqued? Want to learn more about CloudFoundry, the open-source Paas from Pivotal? Check out this epic video on how to setup your own Paas using BOSH from SpringOne2GX 2013. And hear about how other teams acutally did it in the SprignOne2GX replay - Free Yourself with CloudFoundry: A Private Cloud Experience.
9. Data ninja Thomas Risberg just announced the new Spring for Apache Hadoop RC4 release, which is awesome! The new release improves upon the Spring YARN integration. YARN, of course, is the distributed, generic runtime on top of which Hadoop 2.0's very specific map/reduce support now sits. You can use YARN for job distribution of your own, however. You might, for example, use YARN to split up Spring Batch workloads. In the new example, Janne Valkealahti demonstrates a simple Spring Boot-powered Spring YARN component. It's amazing how concise this stuff is now!
10. Want to learn more about Janne Valkealahti, the mad (data) scientist behind our Spring YARN support? Check out this Pivotal People profile!
11. Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke does a nice job introducing the new hotness in Spring Data Dijkstra, the new Spring Data umbrella release. This release includes Java 8 Optional support, asynchronous repository method invocations, and more.
12. Spring Security lead Rob Winch has just two small, bugfixe releases: Spring LDAP 2.0.2, and Spring Security 3.2.4
13. Spring Web Services lead Arjen Poutsma has just announced Spring Web Services 2.2.0, which now features a Java configuration API and much more.
14. Let me take a moment to remind everyone: Java configuration is everywhere! Spring framework, Boot, Data, Security, MVC, Integration, Batch, Social, and much more, all offer as-rich-as-the-XML Java configuration integrations. In the case of Boot, Java configuration is the only out-of-the-box option, though of course you can use XML if you'd like. It's just.. not expected.
15. Spring Security lead also blogged about using Spring Security Test to handle web security
16. Want to write your own Spring Boot starter? Check out this example from Spring ninja Stephane Nicoll on how to provide a HornetQ starter for Spring Boot
17. At long last, Spring Social Google 1.0.0.GA has been released! Congratulations, Gabriel, on all the work required to arrive here. I like the easy-to-use example, too.
18. Arnaud Giuliani has put together a very cool look at using GWT with Spring Boot. Nicely done, Arnaud!
19. Netflix engineer Tomas Lin tweeted a link to a convenient Spring MVC exception handler for REST APIs. This is one (fine) way to approach the problem. As an alternative, I'd suggest you take a look at [using Spring HATEOAS' VndError(s) support]a).

With the release of Spring Boot 1.1.0.M2 came the support for the new template engine that Groovy 2.3 provides. In this post, we will describe the benefits of using such an engine and of course how you can use it in Boot.

All the source code in this post is available on GitHub, so feel free to clone the repository and give it a try:

git clone https://github.com/melix/springboot-groovytemplates.git
cd springboot-groovytemplates
./gradlew run

Then open your browser on http://localhost:8080

This application is fully written in Groovy and also makes use of GORM for Boot, but it is of course…

Speakers: Michael Hunger, Josh Long

Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/jexp/spring-data-neo4j-and-spring-boot

Spring Data Neo4j 3.0 is here and it supports Neo4j 2.0. Neo4j is a tiny graph database with a big punch. Graph databases are imminently suited to asking interesting questions, and doing analysis. Want to load the Facebook friend graph? Build a recommendation engine? Neo4j's just the ticket. Join Spring Data Neo4j lead Michael Hunger (@mesirii) and Spring Developer Advocate Josh Long (@starbuxman) for a look at how to build smart, graph-driven applications with Spring Data Neo4j and Spring Boot.

Note: there are some minor audio issues in the source recording that could not be edited out.

Learn more about Spring Data Neo4j at http://projects.spring.io/spring-data-neo4j/

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We are happy to announce that Spring for Apache Hadoop version 2.0 RC4 is now available.

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Now includes simplified support for building YARN applications

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We are getting close to a GA release of Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.0. Based on feedback from using the Spring Boot support for YARN in the Spring XD project, we have refined the programming model we use for developing YARN applications.

The challenge

We keep challenging Janne to make the model simpler. The latest challenge was to make it possible to write a single Java source file plus one configuration file and keep it under 50 lines. I…

Spring Boot 1.1.0.M2 is available now in the Spring repositories. There are quite a few new features and plenty of new documentation:

• Groovy Template and Velocity support for MVC and offline rendering.

• Big changes to the HealthIndicator interface and the existing implementations, e.g. all database backends (like Mongo etc.) have a default HealthIndicator and the Actuator aggregates them all up into a single readout.

• Support for Spring Data Solr and Spring Data Gemfire, and upgrade to the Spring Data Dijkstra release train

• Support for multiple DataSources through a convenient

DataSourceBuilder abstraction, plus a similar feature for JPA …

Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013 in Santa Clara, CA.

Speaker: Matt Stine

This session will focus on how you can build your very own Cloud Foundry private PaaS running in your own data center or on AWS or even on OpenStack on your own Mac mini. You will learn how the Cloud Foundry BOSH tool constructs a full Cloud Foundry instance from a bare bones virtual machine and continues to coordinate and manage the entire PaaS cloud once it is operational. If you want the convenience of developing against your own private custom PaaS within your company, then this session will give you all the steps you need to get started.

Learn more about using CloudFoundry at: http://www.cloudfoundry.com/use

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Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013 in Santa Clara, CA.

Speakers: Mike Heath, Shawn Nielsen, Mike Youngstrom - LDS Church

Cloud Foundry makes managing and deploying applications incredibly simple. However, deploying Cloud Foundry itself can be a challenging task. We will be sharing what we learned deploying Cloud Foundry and what it took to win over our organization. Learn from our experiences deploying Cloud Foundry with BOSH and integrating with our existing enterprise infrastructure. We will discuss: Developing and customizing Cloud Foundry while staying in sync with the open source repositories Building custom Cloud Foundry services using Java and Spring Improved gathering application diagnostics by simplifying JMX and remote debugging support in Cloud Foundry Enhanced security and auditability with application level firewalls Come learn from our successes as well as our mistakes.

Learn more about using CloudFoundry at: http://www.cloudfoundry.com/use

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