Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the second milestone release 3.3.0.M2 of the Spring Tool Suite (STS) and the Groovy/Grails Tool Suite (GGTS).

Highlights from this milestone build include:

• 4.x-based distributions now on Eclipse Kepler 4.3 (RC2)
• ready for Spring Framework 4
• new and unified "New Spring Project" wizard
• improved support for JavaConfig-driven Spring projects
• Groovy-Eclipse now has a smaller install footprint and uses less memory
• GGTS now includes Grails 2.2.2

Both tool suites ship on top of the latest Eclipse Juno SR2 release as well as on top of the latest Eclipse Kepler 4.3.0.RC2 release candidate. For optimal performance and stability we still recommend the distribution that is based on Eclipse 3.8.2.

The 3.3.0 release is scheduled for July 2013 - shortly after the Eclipse Kepler release.

To download the distributions, please go visit:

• Spring Tool Suite: http://www.springsource.org/sts
• Groovy/Grails Tool Suite: http://grails.org/products/ggts

Detailed new and noteworthy notes can be found here: STS/GGTS 3.3.0.M2 New & Noteworthy.

Enjoy!

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. The SpringOne2GX super early bird registration discount expires on June 10th, 2013, so make your arrangements now to secure the discount. Also, we've got three webinars coming up this month, check out the details below. As usual, we've got a lot to cover, so let's get to it!

1. I'll be doing a webinar on building effective REST APIs with Spring on June 13th. I'll be introducing Spring's deep support for REST services, starting with Spring MVC and moving up the Richardson Maturity Model to incorporate Spring HATEOAS and, ultimately, Spring Data REST. Along the way we'll look at the REST shell, and other concerns like security through OAuth.
2. Join Jon Brisbin as he introduces Reactor in a webinar on June 18th. Reactor provides a foundational framework for applications that need high throughput when performing reasonably small chunks of stateless, asynchronous processing.
3. Join Tony Erksine from Liberty University on June 27th as he instructs us How to talk Spring and Influence People, a pragmatic lesson on soft skills and technology adoption strategies needed to help get other developers in your company excited about,a nd using, new technology -- in this case, with Spring.
4. If you're in the bay area, be sure to check out JAXConf happening right now in Santa Clara. Admission is free and there are some great speakers there. I will be speaking there tomorrow on Spring 4, and Multi Client Development with Spring, so feel free to drop by if you'd like to talk Spring, Cloud Foundry and big-data.
5. You probably saw Paul Chapman's awesome posts introducing Spring MVC's support for content negotiation last month and this month he's back with a post on content negotiation using Spring MVC views. Be sure to check both of them out, as they provide solid foundations for dealing with content negotiation in the ever increasing paradigm of REST.
6. Our friend Petri Kainulainen continues his look at Spring Data SOLR and explains how to add custom repository methods to the implementations above and beyond what Spring Data already provides out of the box. This example is in the context of Spring Data SOLR but the approach is generic and works for all the repository implementations.
7. RabbitMQ ninja Alvaro Videla has done an amazing job introducing RabbitMQ's power in the latest edition of Developer Magazine.
   
8. Every now and then I run into old but cool content, like this project demonstrating how to build a Spring MVC application with Scala. As you might imagine, there's not much difference between Scala and Java, but this is nonetheless an interesting example. Check it out.
9. I've been knee deep in REST, in preparation for my upcoming webinar, and I stumbled upon a great, albeit older, post by Apache Shiro PMC member and REST-ninja Lez Hazelwood on providing good client feedback on errors with REST in Spring MVC.
10. Spring HATEOAS lead and Spring Data ninja Oliver Gierke did an amazing talk introducing Spring HATEOAS at Oredev last year and it's available online. Definitely be sure to check it out!
11. Our pal Nicolas Fränkel is back, this time with a short rant on how to approach modularity in Spring configuration.
    
12. JavaBeat has a nice post on how to handle themes in Spring MVC.
13. The BitwiseOR blog has a nice post on how to setup a simple, working Spring MVC application.
14. Alexey Zvolinskiy put together a nice, complete-with-code, post on how to use Spring Data JPA to build an application.
15. David, from The small world for Yiyi blog, has put together a nice post on using PDF, XML and JSON from Spring MVC.
16. Our pal Johnathan Mark Smith is back, this time with another video introducing how to use Spring's Java configuration

In my previous post I introduced the concept of content negotiation and the three strategies Spring MVC uses to determine the content requested.

In this post I want to extend the concept specifically to supporting multiple views for different content-types using the ContentNegotiatingViewResolver (or CNVR).

Quick Overview

Since we already know how to setup content-negotiation from the previous post, using it to select between multiple views is very straightforward. Simply define a CNVR like this:

    <!--
      // View resolver that delegates to other view resolvers based on the
      // content type…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. In case you missed it last week, the vast majorty of the SpringOne2GX 2013 agenda has been published, so book now and get the early bird rate on the conference, and airfare! As usual, we've got a lot to cover this week, so let's get to it!

1. Spring Batch lead Michael Minella announced Spring Batch 2.2.0 RC2. The new release is chalk full of great new features including support for the Spring Batch Java configuration API and a Spring Data GemFire ItemReader and ItemWriter.
2. Gary Russell just announced Spring Integration 3.0 milestone 2. Be sure to check out the new features and kick the tires!
3. Join me for a webinar on Building REST-ful Services with Spring - June 13th, 2013. I'll discuss OAUTH, Spring MVC and Spring HATEOAS as it relates to REST.
4. Rossen Stoyanchev's blogged about the upcoming support for WebSockets in Spring 4 and it looks very compelling!
5. Gary Russell also just announced the Spring Integration MQTT extension adapter, milestone 1, that makes it easy to work with MQTT - a messaging technology that lends itself to lightweight messaging - from Spring Integration.
6. Oliver Gierke has written up a great response to the question, how do I return a Spring Data page as JSON on Stack Overflow.
7. Long-time readers of this roundup will know about Thymeleaf, the templating engine that breathes new life into your web application view templates and that works really well with Spring. The first, stable 2.0.0 version of Thymeleaf-testing has just been released.
8. Joris Kuipers, on the Trifork blog, has announced a new set of macros for doing form inputs with Spring applications using Freemarker, an alternative - and very powerful - templating engine.
9. Oleg Tsal-Tsalko put together a talk on the new bits in Spring 4. Nicely done, Oleg!
10. Johnathan Mark Smith is back at it again, this time with a video on how to do Java configuration with Spring. Check it out!
11. Maciej Walkowiak put together a great post on how to audit entities using Spring Data MongoDB.
12. The poorly-named Java2J2EE blog has a great, short-and-sweet post on how to setup JPA and Spring MVC with Spring's Java configuration style. I would however discourage users from calling the lifecycle methods on a Spring FactoryBean directly, and instead choose to dereference the configured result:

    @Bean public EntityManagerFactory emf(){
       LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean lcemfb = ..
       return lcemfb;
    } 
    
    @Bean public PlatformTransactionManager transactionManager(){
      EntityManagerFactory emf = emf().getObject();
      return new JpaTransactionManager( emf );
    } 
    
    

We are pleased to announce that the second milestone for Spring Integration 3.0.0 is now available.

64 issues are resolved, including many improvements and new features; see the Project Home Page and Release Notes for more information.

As you may have seen, the first milestone of Spring Framework 4.0 was already announced and with it we've released early WebSocket support. Why WebSocket matters? It enables efficient, two-way communication over the web that is essential in applications where messages need to be exchanged between client (typically browser) and server at high frequency and with low latency. Common examples include trading, games, collaboration, data visualization, and others but the range of scenarios and use cases will grow over time.

WebSocket is a very broad subject! You can watch our “Intro to WebSocket” on…

This Week in Spring

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! We are finally running out of SpringOne2GX video recordings.. this is the last week in Spring that you'll see them, so refer back to the replays page for an index. As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it!

1. Spring lead Juergen Hoeller just announced the release of Spring Framework 4.0 M1 and 3.2.3.RELEASE The 3.2.3 update mainly includes updates and fixes related to Java 8 support. The 4.0 milestone, on the other hand, is a look ahead to the many awesome features in Spring 4.0 including support for web sockets, Java EE 7, the @Conditional annotation (in the same vein as the @Profile annotation) and much more, so be sure to check it out!
2. TcServer 2.9.2 is now available! The release contains security fixes and updates, for more details check out the release notes.
3. Jennifer Hickey's talk -- Thinking outside the container - Standalone Applications on CloudFoundry has been released in HD on YouTube.
4. Stephen Bohlen's talk --An Introduction to Spring.NET for Java developers, has been released in HD on YouTube.
5. InfoQ has done a nice writeup of Spring HATEOAS
6. Johnathan Mark Smith has put together a nice post on how to use Spring's Java configuration style.
7. Xavier Padró has put together a nice post on how to communicate within a Spring Web Flow flow
8. Static.com has announced their Hadoop and Cloud Foundry-powered service. Frankly, it looks really cool and cost-effective as a public platform on which to host applications that need a backoffice Hadoop solution.
9. I can't believe I missed this! RabbitMQ 3.1.0 is out (slightly old news) and, to introduce it, you should check out this amazing RabbitMQ 3.1.0 in pictures.
10. The HMKCode blog has a nice post on doing the not-so-well-documented, but common, things with a MyBatis, Spring and jUnit integration.
11. The Java Code Geeks have put together a nice tutorial on how to process radio buttons in a form in Spring MVC.
    
12. Gerry Tan has put together a nice blog on how to bind form date values with Spring MVC.

Dear Spring community,

It's my pleasure to announce the first milestone towards Spring Framework 4.0, delivering a first cut of our work on several key themes:

• the first wave of Java SE 8 / OpenJDK 8 support (some details following below)
• initial support for JMS 2.0, JPA 2.1, Bean Validation 1.1, and JSR-236 concurrency (from the EE 7 umbrella)
• a first cut of our generalized condition mechanism for bean definitions (@Conditional along the lines of @Profile)
• Spring's WebSocket endpoint model (which Rossen will be introducing in more detail soon)

With respect to Java SE 8, we support OpenJDK 8 build 88+ in several areas of the framework:

• support for the 1.8 bytecode format in component scanning and subclass generation
• lambda expressions and method references against Spring callback interfaces
• JSR-310 Date-Time value types for Spring data binding and formatting
• initial support for the JDK 8 parameter name discovery mechanism

Note: Spring's Java 8 support is a work in progress and tracking OpenJDK 8 snapshots on their way to the JDK 8 Developer Preview date in September (see http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/). We expect to release a corresponding Spring Framework 4.0 release candidate around that time, to be presented at SpringOne (September 9-12; see http://springone2gx.com…

We are pleased to announce that Spring Batch 2.2.0.RC2 is now available via the SpringSource Milestone repository.
Spring Batch Home | Source on GitHub | Reference Documentation

This release addresses bugs and improvements on the features released in the 2.2.0.RC1 release. You can read more about the specific updates in this release in the Spring Batch changelog here: 2.2.0-RC1 to 2.2.0.RC2

Links

Spring Batch Home | Source on GitHub | Reference Documentation