Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! I'm off to Oslo, Norway for the JavaZone conference to talk to people about using Spring Integration and Spring Batch on top of Cloud Foundry. Again, this is a natural use case: Cloud Foundry makes it easy to scale to handle the largest workloads, and Spring Integration and Spring Batch, presumably sitting on top of RabbitMQ, take care of the plumbing and do the heavy lifting of workload distribution across the cluster.

 <P>Wrapping up from last week's Cloud Foundry   Open Tour - India, touring <a href="http://opentour.cloudfoundry…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce the release of Spring Social Facebook 1.0.2!

This release primarily adjusts Spring Social Facebook's API binding to some recent and upcoming changes in the Facebook Graph API. Specifically:

• The "picture" field of many objects in the Facebook's Graph API is changing from a simple string containing the URL to an object with additional information about the picture. Spring Social Facebook's API binding has been changed to handle either form and return the URL string.
• The "likes" field of the Graph API's Comment object has been renamed to "like_count". Spring Social Facebook's API binding has been changed to bind to the new "like_count" field.
• The picture property of Page, Post, and Video has been deprecated. While it will still return the URL string for a picture in 1.0.2, this property will be replaced in Spring Social Facebook 1.1.0 with one that returns an object with more complete metadata about the picture.
• The position property of the Photo object has been deprecated, as this property will no longer be populated by the Facebook Graph API. This property will be removed in Spring Social Facebook 1.1.0.

To get the software, download the release distribution or simply add/update the maven artifacts to your project:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.social</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-social-facebook</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.2.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

We are continuing to monitor any changes that Facebook may apply in their graph API and if an adjustment in Spring Social Facebook's API binding is required, will release followup maintenance releases with those adjustments. We are also looking ahead to the 1.1.0 release of Spring Social, Spring Social Twitter, and Spring Social Facebook with some exciting new features in the coming months. We invite you to participate in the discussion in the Spring Social forum, in the issue tracker (Core|Facebook|Twitter), or at GitHub (Core|Facebook|Twitter).

I was thrilled to see in a recent survey from zeroturnaround that Spring MVC was voted the most popular web framework for Java.

This framework is very flexible and there are dozens of ways to use it. As with all flexible frameworks that have many options, it is important to discuss common practices.

The project I have created for this blog entry uses features common in many Spring MVC applications. You will find something like this:

In controllers you will find typical Spring MVC features for mapping requests, extracting request data through annotations, data binding, file upload…

On the…

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring, VMWorld edition! We're at the VMWorld event, talking to developers about Spring and Cloud Foundry. There's been a lot of exciting news coming out of this event, including some interesting updates around vFabric and updates regarding the timelines for Cloud Foundry itself: CloudFoundry.com, the hosted PaaS from VMware, will be GA by end-of-year, and next year will see the availability of a private on-premise Cloud Foundry. Both vFabric and Cloud Foundry are ideal environments for your Spring applications, and it's nice to see these platforms evolve.

1. Oliver Gierke has announced that the Spring Data Release Train has reached the station! This release is an umbrella release of several projects that provides uniformity across the various modules.

   	This release includes Spring Data Commons 1.4.0.RC1, Spring Data JPA 1.2.0.RC1, 
   	Spring Data MongoDB 1.1.0.RC1, Spring Data Neo4j 2.1.0.RC3 and Spring Data Gemfire 1.2.0.RC1.
   	
   	
   	  </LI>
   <LI> Gunnar Hillert has a nice blog introducing how to <a href = "http://blog.springsource.org/2012/08/23/spring-integration-extensions/">bootstrap custom Spring Integration adapter development.</a>
   	 
   	 </LI>
   
   <LI>  Gary Russel has announced that the latest iteration of  <a href  = "http://www.springsource.org/node/3639">Spring Integration, 2.2.0M4, is now available</a>.  Gary, a very busy man indeed…

#spring #batch 2.1.9.RELEASE is available (download github http://bit.ly/NYXItL or Maven central). Thanks to all contributors!

It's mostly bugfixes for 2.1.8, plus a few interesting additions (e.g. nested tasklets from any namespace to support Spring Hadoop): http://static.springsource.org/sprin...1.8-2.1.9.html.

The first real commit for 2.2 came in as a pull request. Nice work! Please keep them coming.

Dear Spring community, I am pleased to announce the next Spring Data release train stop, including Spring Data JPA, MongoDB, Neo4j, Gemfire as well as its foundation Spring Data Commons. The release is the final one before bringing all the modules into GA state of their next major version. Here are the highlights:

All modules

• Depend on Spring 3.1.2 by default. The modules are still fully compatible with Spring 3.0.7 but users have to manually declare Spring dependencies in they Maven pom.xml files if they'd like to use the older version. Note that some of the features included in this release (e.g. the usage of @EnableRepositories) require Spring 3.1.0 at least.
…

Spring AMQP provides the familiar benefits of the Spring programming model to AMQP and, specifically, Rabbit MQ.

We are pleased to announce the availability of the 1.1.2 maintenance release of spring-amqp for Java, which includes a number of important bug fixes.

For more information, refer to the project home page.

The Spring Integration team proudly announces the availability of the Spring Integration Extensions repository. The main goal for this new GitHub-based repository is to promote a vibrant community of adapter and extension developers, and to encourage a broader segment of the community to contribute to the project. The Spring Integration Extensions project is hosted at:

• https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-integration-extensions

This new repository will give us the flexibility to incorporate new contributions much more rapidly, without having to go through the core Spring Integration framework’s stricter vetting process. Since each community contributed extension is a separate project in the Spring Integration Extensions repository, it will have its own release life-cycle independent from the one that governs the core Spring Integration framework. As a result, this will allow for more frequent releases.

Over time, we expect that some of the lesser used Spring Integration modules may transition into the Extensions repository. On the other hand, for some extension modules, the Spring Integration Extensions project may also serve as an incubator, whereby they may eventually be incorporated into the core Spring Integration framework.

Thanks to several community contributions, the new repository already provides several adapters such as the XQuery Adapter (incl. support for XPath 2.0) and the SMB Adapter. Several adapters around Amazon Web Services (AWS) will be added in the coming weeks (Amazon S3, Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS). Furthermore, we are providing an early version of a Print Adapter and we are also working on an adapter providing WebSocket support using Atmosphere.

How Can I Become a Contributor?

If you have an idea regarding new extensions and/or adapters, please feel free to file a JIRA ticket. If you have already created an extension module and you want to contribute code, please fork the Spring Integration Extensions repository, add your module and issue a pull request. Before we can merge your code, though, you have to fill out the Contributor License Agreement. Once submitted, we and/or other community members will review your pull request and merge it. For much more detailed information, please take a closer look at the Contributor Guidelines for the Spring Integration Extensions project.

Creating New Spring Integration Extension Modules

One of the more popular extension types are Spring Integration Adapters. In order to simplify the process of writing custom adapters for Spring Integration, we now provide an Adapter Template for SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) 3.0.0. This template will make it very easy for contributors to build out new adapters quickly, while still ensuring consistency with those provided in the core Spring Integration framework (package structure, naming conventions, namespace handlers/parsers, etc).

The Spring Integration Adapter Template, which is part of the Spring Integration Templates project, creates a fully functional Spring Integration Module, and the template will create the following commonly used components:

• Inbound Channel Adapter
• Outbound Channel Adapter
• Outbound Gateway

The template will not only create the core Java classes and some basic unit tests, but it will also provide XML Namespace support, which includes the XML Schema and the associated parser classes. Even if you create other types of components, this template should still give you valuable insights into how to develop those. For more information on using STS Templates for Spring Integration, please see the following blog posting:

• Creating Spring Integration Projects Using STS.

The created adapter project will use Gradle as its build tool, and it closely follows the build tasks as defined for Spring Integration:

Build the Adapter project

    $ ./gradlew build

Install the Adapter project to your local Maven repository

    $ ./gradlew install

Generate the JavaDoc

    $ ./gradlew api

Generate metrics using Sonar

    $ ./gradlew sonar

Build the complete distribution

    $ ./gradlew dist

For more information please see How to Create New Components on the Spring Integration Extensions Wiki.

Further Resources

• JIRA
• Forums
• Build Server
• Metrics

Spring Integration GitHub Repositories

For completeness, here is a list of all Spring Integration relevant GitHub repositories:

• Spring Integration
• Spring Integration Extensions
• Spring Integration Samples
• Spring Integration Templates
• Spring Integration Dsl Groovy
• Spring Integration Dsl Scala

Spring Integration 2.2.0.M4 - the fourth and final milestone release of the 2.2 stream, including a number of important features and improvements, is now available.

• Release notes are available here.
• Artifacts are available in the SpringSource repo and the community download page.

More information is available on the project's home page.