The fifth maintenance release in the Spring Framework 3.2.x line is now available via Maven Central or the SpringSource repository. This release includes nearly 50 bug fixes and improvements and we recommend that all users upgrade.

Documentation | Javadoc API | Change Log | JIRA | GitHub

Are you interested in the latest on Spring Framework 4 and Java 8, Web Socket architectures, running Spring applications that fit in a tweet with Spring Boot, tackling big data complexity with Spring XD, rich client apps with Spring and AngularJS and lots more?

With the dust settling on SpringOne2GX 2013, you have a great opportunity to catch up on all the great new project announcements and speak directly to the developers and the community that made them happen at the London Spring eXchange 14th -15th November.

Spring Exchange is a two-day conference bringing together the UK Spring…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! I'm in Malmo, Sweden at the fantastic Øredev conference, talking to developers about Spring, Cloud Foundry, and more! I'll be at JMaghreb next week and then at Devoxx 2013 where I'll be talking to developers about Spring, Cloud Foundry, RabbitMQ and more along with my pals Dr. Dave Syer, Alvaro Videla, and Andy Piper. Looking forward to seeing you at any of these places! Ping me on Twitter (@starbuxman) if you want to talk Spring, the cloud, big data and anyting else!

With that, we've got a lot of really great stuff this week so let's get to it!

1. First, the big news: Spring Framework 4.0 RC1 has been released! The new release includes full compatability with OpenJDK 8 developer previews, Groovy configured beans, improvements to Spring MVC, smarter proxies, time zone resolution (connected to JSR 310 and Joda-Time), Spring HATEOAS-inspired link-building, improved websocket support, and a lot more! Get the bits, test your apps, and be sure to let us know how you like it!
2. Spring Security lead Rob Winch is at it again, this time with a Spring Security 3.2.0 RC2 release which includes resolutions for 80+ issues, and a slew of upates - some breaking, so to be sure to update and verify everything.
3. Additionally, Rob's just released Spring LDAP 2.0.0.M1, which adds a lot of new functionality including Spring Data repository and QueryDSL support, a fluent LDAP query builder, a custom XML namespace for LDAP, Java 5 featues, and some restructuring
4. P.S.: If you happen to be in the London area or with easy access to it, check out the Spring eXchange: a packed two-day show on Nov 14/15, with key Spring engineers presenting the latest and greatest - of course including Spring Framework 4.0!
5. I gave a talk at JavaOne called the Spring Update that looks at a lot of the cool new things coming out of the Spring division at Pivotal. The talk is now online at Parleys.com so check it out!
6. Paul Chapman's put together a very good post explaining error handling strategies in Spring MVC
7. Daniel Lipp and Tobias Mattsson, from Magnolia, did a nice webinar introducing how to integrate the Magnolia CMS with Spring and Grails based applications. Cool stuff!
8. Greg Turnquist continues the narrative on Spring Boot and talks about how to add property support to a custom Spring Boot module.
9. Blogger Hébert Oliveira has put together an epic post on using Spring MVC, Spring Data, Spring Security, Bootstrap, and Angular.js together. Definitely worth a look!
10. I'm excited to see Thymeleaf 2.1 support for automatic Spring Security CSRF integration. Nice job!
11. Spring's documentation is now moving to Asciidoc! This is interesting mostly because it'll be easier to update and maintain the documentation now, and you can expect even better docs as a result!
12. Spring Boot tip thanks to Dr. Dave Syer: any bean of type TomcatConnectorCustomizer in a Spring Boot application will give you a callback reference to the Connector which you can then use to customize the embedded Tomcat instance. One possible application of this is applying SSL to the embedded Tomcat instance.
13. Speaking of Spring Boot, check out this Spring Boot Java app, a "full-featured" reference app that runs on @CloudFoundry that's designed to monitor builds. Nice job, Ben Hale!

Spring Security 3.2.0.RC2 is now available from the SpringSource repository at http://repo.springsource.org. See here for a quick tutorial on resolving these artifacts via Maven.

What's new?

The release resolves 80+ issues. Most of the issues for this release were fixing bug, adding documentation, and converting our documentation to Asciidoctor.

Refer to the recently added What's new in Spring Security 3.2 to find all the highlights of this release. You will notice there are some nice features that have been added that I have not blogged about. Be sure to follow the links to see and links to…

I'm pleased to announce that Spring LDAP 2.0.0.M1 is now available from the SpringSource repository at http://repo.springsource.org. See here for a quick tutorial on resolving these artifacts via Maven.

What's New?

The release adds lots of new functionality! Some of the highlights can be found below:

• Spring Data Repository and QueryDSL support is now included in Spring LDAP.
• Fluent LDAP query support has been added.
• A custom XML namespace is now provided to simplify configuration of Spring LDAP.
• Spring LDAP core has been updated with Java 5 features such as generics and varargs.
• The ODM (Object-Directory Mapping) functionality has been moved to core and there are new methods in LdapOperations/LdapTemplate that uses this automatic translation to/from ODM-annotated classes.
…

Dear Spring community,

I'm pleased to announce the availability of our first Spring Framework 4.0 release candidate. This release completes our 4.0 feature set with several new features since M3:

• full compatibility with recent OpenJDK 8 Developer Preview builds
• first-class support for Groovy-based bean definitions (as known from Grails)
• autowiring based on generic types (e.g. MyRepository<Customer>)
• using Objenesis to create CGLIB proxy instances (allowing for constructor injection)
• the introduction of a ScriptEvaluator mechanism (including JSR-223 support)
• time zone resolution in Spring MVC (connected to JSR-310 and Joda-Time)
• finer-grained configuration options for Spring MVC's @ControllerAdvice
• the introduction of MvcUriComponentsBuilder (inspired by Spring HATEOAS)
• …

NOTE: Revised April 2018

Spring MVC provides several complimentary approaches to exception handling but, when teaching Spring MVC, I often find that my students are confused or not comfortable with them.

Today I'm going to show you the various options available. Our goal is to not handle exceptions explicitly in Controller methods where possible. They are a cross-cutting concern better handled separately in dedicated code.

There are three options: per exception, per controller or globally.

A demonstration application that shows the points discussed here can be found at http://github.com/paulc4/mvc-exceptions. See Sample Application…

Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013 in Santa Clara, CA.

Speakers: Daniel Lipp and Tobias Mattsson, Magnolia

Want Spring seamlessly available inside a CMS? How about being able to integrate existing Spring apps into your CMS without rewriting a bunch of code? What about a robust CMS solution for Grails? Meet Magnolia, a mature open source CMS written in Java on the best of the Java stack (including Spring and Groovy.) This session will introduce Magnolia's Spring integration and give you a tour of its architecture, key features and use. Along the way, you'll also get insights into the development of Magnolia's Spring integration, an overview of Magnolia's key features (like workflows, innovative multi-channel support and a damn fine user experience that includes touch devices), and brief tutorials on solving some key content management challenges faced by Spring developers. There will also be a quick detour into Magnolia's Groovy shell and MagLev, a Grails plugin for Magnolia.

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Spring Boot is continuing to gather steam. Last month I wrote Contributing to Spring Boot with a pull request. I peeled back the layers of Spring Boot to demonstrate it's incredible autoconfiguration features and CLI support.

In this post, I want to dig into Spring Boot's amazing support for properties. Properties are something that are small, not highly visible, yet can quickly strengthen your application in very practical ways. In this post, I'll walk through how I added property support to the Spring JMS support I coded in the previous blog post.

What are properties?

Properties are…