Welcome to another edition of "This Week in Spring" Things are moving fast and furious as we near next week's VMworld 2011. I want to invite any attendees to visit your expert technologists at the VMWorld Spring booth. Let me know if you read this weekly roundup. Lots to talk about this week, so let's get to it!

<li>The preliminary session schedule has been published for <a href="http://www.springone2gx.com">SpringOne 2GX 2011</a>. This year's show is going to be another fantastic mix of deep technical content, cutting edge development and the absolute best place to learn about everything in the Spring universe. Be sure to <a href="http://springone2gx.com/conference/chicago/2011/10/register">register now</a>!</li>

<LI> <a href="http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.6.RELEASE/changelog.txt">Spring 3.0.6's was just released!</a>   		 
	 This release addresses over 50 minor issues and includes…

With so much of the focus on the new features in Spring 3.1, it is important to remember that the 3.0.x branch is still being updated. Sneaking in under the radar last week, we saw the release of Spring 3.0.6. This release addresses over 50 minor issues and includes about a dozen small improvements. Be sure to read the Change Log for all the details.

Download | Documentation | Javadoc API | Change Log | JIRA

Don't forget that Spring users can ask questions in the community forum and identify issues in JIRA as well.

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the second release (1.1.0.RELEASE) of the Spring Data Graph project with Neo4j support is now available!

After the first public release of Spring Data Graph in April 2011 we mainly focused on user feedback.

With the improved documentation around the tooling and an upgraded AspectJ version we addressed many of the AspectJ issues that where reported by users. With the latest STS and Eclipse and hopefully with Idea11 it is possible to develop Spring Data Graph applications without the red wiggles. To further ease the development we also provided sample build scripts for ant/ivy and a plugin for gradle.

Of course we kept pace with development of Neo4j, currently using the latest stable release of Neo4j (1.4.1).

During the last months of Neo4j development the improved querying (Cypher, Gremlin) support was one of the important aspects. So we strove to support it on all levels. Now, it is possible to execute Cypher queries from Spring Data Graph Repositories, from the Neo4j-Template but also as part of dynamic field annotations and via the introduced entity methods. The same goes for Gremlin scripts. What's possible with this new expressive power? Let's take a look.

For example, in a repository:

	public interface PersonRepository extends GraphRepository, NamedIndexRepository {
	
	    @Query("start team=(%team) match (team)-[:persons]->(member) return member")
	    Iterable findAllTeamMembers(@Param("team") Group team);
	
	    @Query(value = "g.v(team).out('persons')", type = QueryType.Gremlin)
	    Iterable findAllTeamMembersGremlin(@Param("team") Group team);
	}

The Neo4j Template API got a complete overhaul which resulted in much fewer, more focused methods. The advanced query result handling capabilities (type conversion, mapping, single results, handler, etc.) are now implemented using a more fluent API. This new API is available for all types of queries, whether index lookups, graph traversals, Cypher queries or Gremlin scripts.

	template.query("start n=(0) match n-->m return m", null).to(Node.class);
template.execute("g.v(0).out", null).to(Node.class);

template.lookup("relationship", "name", "rel1").to(String.class, new PropertyContainerNameConverter()).single();

template.traverse(referenceNode, traversalDescription).handle(new Handler<Path>() {
            public void handle(Path value) {
                final String name = (String) value.endNode().getProperty("name", "");
                resultSet.add(name…

One of the many nice features of Grails is the way it will automatically create your database schema for you from your domain model. Admittedly it's a feature of Hibernate that Grails uses, but still, it helps you get started very quickly with database-driven web applications without having to worry about the database schema.

Last week the availability of RabbitMQ as a service on Cloud Foundry was announced. Any application running on Cloud Foundry may now send and receive messages via a RabbitMQ broker that can be provisioned as a service with a single command (e.g. 'vmc create-service rabbitmq'). Instances of the messaging service may be shared between applications, and since RabbitMQ is a protocol-based broker, those applications may even be written in different languages. So, this is an exciting announcement for those interested in modular, polyglot, event-driven applications running in the cloud. I will be…

Spring has rich support for transaction management through its PlatformTransactionManager interface and the hierarchy of implementations. Spring's transaction support provides a consistent interface for the transactional semantics of numerous APIs. Broadly, transactions can be split into two categories: local transactions and global transactions. Local transactions are those that affect only one transaction resource. Most often, these resources have their own transactional APIs, even if the notion of a transaction is not explicitly surfaced. Often it's surfaced as the concept of a session, a…

Dear Spring Community,

I looked at what a basic FactoryBean is in my previous post. While FactoryBeans are important - and knowing what they do can help you navigate the framework more effectively - they're by and large no longer the recommended approach to the task as of Spring 3.0 and the imminent Spring 3.1.

<beans ...>
	<context:property-placeholder location = "ds.properties" />

	<bean id = "ds" class = "a.b.c.MySqlDataSource">
	  <property name = "user" value = "${ds.user}"/>
	  <property name = "password" value = "${ds.password}"/>
	</bean>
</beans>

 
import a.b.c.* ;
	
@Configuration 
@PropertySource("ds.properties") 
public class MyConfiguration { 
    @Inject private Environment env ; 
	
    @Bean public MySqlDataSource ds(){ 
        MySqlDataSource ds = new MySqlDataSource () ; 
        ds.setUser( env.getProperty("ds.user") );
        ds.setPassword( env.getProperty("ds.password…

In this post, I'll look at Spring's org.springframework.beans.factory.FactoryBean<T> interface. The definition of this interface is:

public interface FactoryBean<T> {
  T getObject() throws Exception;
  Class<T> getObjectType();
  boolean isSingleton();
}

public class Person { 
 private Car car ;
 private void setCar(Car car){ this.car = car;  }	
}

public class MyCarFactoryBean implements FactoryBean<Car>{
  private String make; 
  private int year ;

  public void setMake(String m){ this.make =m ; }

  public void setYear(int y){ this.year = y; }

  public Car getObject(){ 
    // wouldn't be a very useful FactoryBean 
    // if we could simply instantiate the object…