The Spring Roo team is delighted to announce the availability of 1.2.0 Release Candidate 1. The Roo 1.2.0.RC1 release follows on from M1 and includes two exciting new features:

• Multi-module Maven project support. This is the Roo community's most popular and most voted for feature (ROO-120). You can now create projects with a parent POM and as many project modules as you wish. For example, you can put your domain model in one module and separate out your UI code such as MVC or GWT, into their own modules.  Full documentation on this feature will be available in the general availability release of Roo 1.2.0 later this year.
• JSF 2.0/PrimeFaces 3. The second most popular community feature and most asked for feature in the recent Roo survey - JSF 2.0/PrimeFaces support (ROO-516). You can now scaffold high-quality JSF applications utilizing the stunning components from the PrimeFaces 3.0 component library. Full round-tripping of code, switching between JSF 2.0 implementations (Oracle Mojarra or Apache MyFaces), and PrimeFaces theme selection via a Roo command are supported.

We have also enhanced our Roo annotations to give you more flexibility over the way you configure your persistence layer:

• No need to have the "Active Record"-pattern persistence code in your domain objects any longer. The new @RooJpaEntity annotation ensures only the @Entity, @Id, and @Version fields and methods are created and maintained by Roo, with no CRUD methods. Classes annotated with @RooJpaEntity are intended to be used with Roo's JPA repository and service layering features.
• The old @RooEntity annotation has been renamed to @RooJpaActiveRecord and is still the default when creating entities and will introduce the same CRUD methods as before.
• Use RC1 in existing Roo projects? - easy, simply rename your @RooEntity annotations to @RooJpaActiveRecord and use the organize imports feature in STS or Eclipse to resolve the imports.

We hope you enjoy this new release. Please share your experiences via the community forum, follow @SpringRoo for the latest news, or use #springroo in your tweets

Alan Stewart, Project Lead - Spring Roo

We are pleased to announce that Spring Integration 2.1 Release Candidate 1 is now available. Release Notes | Documentation | Download

If you would like to grab the artifacts via Maven, please use the following repository and dependency configuration (and replace 'core' with any other modules you want to use, e.g. 'amqp', 'gemfire', 'http'):

<repository>     <id>repository.springframework.maven.milestone</id>     <name>Spring Framework Maven Milestone Repository</name>     <url>http://maven.springframework.org/milestone&lt;/url> </repository>

<dependency>     <groupId>org.springframework…

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring. For those of us in the US, the Thanksgiving holiday is upon us.

Generally, the idea behind Thanksgiving (which has analogs in many other countries, as well) is to have a day to reflect on the things we are thankful for.

In that spirit, let me offer one of the things that I am thankful for: thank you, dear readers, for being part of the most awesome community out there. Between all the cool stuff you guys are doing and all the cool stuff happening at SpringSource, it is an absolute pleasure to put together this roundup every week. We…

In this new video interview from InfoQ, Spring expert, Costin Leau talks about Spring Data, caching, data grid architectures and work on a new Spring Hadoop project. This interview, filmed last month at JavaOne 2011, provides some great background to how the Spring team has been thinking about data and how the emerging new models of data access can be incorporated seamlessly into your Spring applications.

Costin talks about :

• Spring Data as an umbrella project
• Transaction capabilities in the world of noSQL
• Flexible caching integration in Spring
• The current development work on Spring Hadoop

Many thanks to InfoQ for taking the time to talk to the Spring experts and providing this outstanding interview to the community.

Dear Spring Community, We are pleased to announce the first release candidate of the Spring GemFire 1.1 project is now available! The Spring GemFire project aims to make it easier to build Spring-powered highly scalable applications using GemFire as distributed data management platform.

The updates in this release include:

• Aligned Maven naming to Spring Data conventions (new ids are org.springframework.data/spring-data-gemfire)
• Introduced PDX attributes on cache and client-cache namespace
• Upgrade to GemFire 6.6.1

Download it now: Spring GemFire for Java | Spring GemFire for .NET

We look forward to your feedback!

Dear Spring Community,

The Spring Data Team and Neo Technology have just released the Release Candidate 1 of Spring Data Neo4j, the integration library for Neo4j the Enterprise NOSQL database.

Integrating the feedback from the very successful SpringOne 2011 and our community we exended the previous Milestone release with new functionality and took care of reported issues.

If you'd like to get an Introduction to Spring Data Neo4j, watch out for our presentations/webinars.

Changes

• Updated Neo4j to 1.5 AspectJ to 1.6.12
• Added repository support for the new Cypher-DSL (1.5.M1) (with QueryDSL support)
• Updated cypher syntax changes for 1.5
• Extended result-handling-dsl to allow changes of container classes
• Added examples for hello-worlds and cypher for both mapping options
• @RelationshipEntity has an fallback relationship-type attribute
• Support for (mutable) @RelatedToVia collections (like Set)
• Relationship-Entities can now be directly instantiated and persisted
• Introduced the concept of a MappingPolicy for the POJO mapping mode (currently @Fetch)
• Simplified cineasts using annotated and derived queries on repositories
• Added repository for access of relationship-related methods
• Improved support for collection properties
• List, Set, Collection, Page as return types on derived and annotated query methods

This is the last step before the final release of the new major version, so we're looking for even more feedback to provide an excellent GA release of Spring Data Neo4j. Please provide it in the forum or the issue tracker.

Project resources: Downloads | Reference Card | JavaDocs | Spring Data Graph Guide Book | Changelog | GitHub Repository

Spring 3.1 adds significant new support for environments. This new Environment API makes it easy to expose properties to an application or conditionally load a fragment of configuration.

In an earlier post in this series, Ramnivas showed how Cloud Foundry can automatically connect to a database without manual configuration. When you need more control over this process, e.g. connecting to multiple databases, the cloud namespace condenses the configuration of a DataSource into just a single line of XML. The cloud namespace is powerful, but it is only supported for applications running in Cloud…

We saw in the previous blog post Using Cloud Foundry Services with Spring: Part 2 - Auto-reconfiguration that when you deploy a Spring application, your use of data services will be detected, and your application will automatically be re-configured to use the cloud services available to your application. This works great for simple applications and demos, but if you have a serious production application you probably want to have more control. You also need more control if you have multiple services of the same type. Ramnivas hinted at this saying that you can opt out of auto-reconfiguration by…

Another fantastic week in the Spring community. Can you guys believe it's already the 8th of November? Where does the time go?

If you blink, we'll be in 2012 already! 
No time to waste - the year might change out from underneath us! - let's dive right into this week's roundup!

1. Ramnivas Laddad, senior engineer on the Cloud Foundry project and a hero world wide to those who - like me - enjoy the use of AspectJ in their Spring applications, has put together a fantastic post shining a light on the specific support for services (like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and RabbitMQ) in Cloud Foundry. This is the second post in a series. Read the first one to learn about the basics of services on Cloud Foundry. Awesome posts with great details.
2. This next post is among the posts that made me smile this week. Roy Clarkson and I did a talk at SpringOne 2GX a few weeks ago on native Android development practices with Spring. We sat down the night before our talk and ran through our deck and demonstrations, only to realize that - in the interim weeks since everything was originally prepared, the delicate spider's web of configuration required to get Eclipse (SpringSource Tool Suite), Maven, and Android all speaking to each other and working correctly had been... disturbed. We did the talk with a non-Maven build with great success, but it still irked us that we had to switch to a regular Eclipse build so that the talk could proceed. Roy, always intrepid and fearless, has since figured out the right permutations of configurations required to get this all working again and - generous guy that he is - he has documented everything in this blog. Check it out! (I know I did!)
3. Tomcat Expert has another practical column on administering and developing with Apache Tomcat 7. The post explains how to take the default security configuration Apache Tomcat 7 to the next level with a bit of background on the configuration options available.

   </LI> 
   
   
   
   <LI> Roger Hughes <a href="http://java.dzone.com/articles/using-jsr-250s-postconstruct">introduces how to use JSR 250's <CODE>@PostConstruct</CODE> and <CODE>@PreDestroy</CODE> annotations</A> to replace the use of the corresponding Spring  callback interfaces, <CODE>InitializingBean</CODE> and <CODE>DisposableBean</CODE>.   </LI> 
   
   <LI>Michal Huniewicz explains <a href= "http://blog.m1key.me/2011/10/wizard-form-with-spring-mvc…