Dear Spring Community,

We’re happy to announce the availability of Spring Roo 1.1.5 (download here). Spring Roo is a rapid application development tool for Java, allowing you to create full enterprise applications in just minutes.

The new release features over 95 improvements and bug fixes since the 1.1.4 release. The next release of Roo will be 1.2.0.RC1 where new features such as application layering support and a new JSF UI option will be introduced.

Also, please check out the Vaadin Plugin for Spring Roo tutorial.

The reference guide is also included in the download ZIP.

Spring Roo has a very active community and responsive development team, so if you have any questions on this new release, please feel free to ask the Spring Roo engineering team on the Community Forum. You'll also find us on Twitter - either follow @SpringRoo…

Other Presentations

Spring MVC 3.1 Update - Rossen Stoyanchev: This session will delve into more detail on Spring MVC 3.1 related updates. The major topics include a new infrastructure for processing annotated controller methods, namespace configuration improvements, conversation management, and Servlet 3.0 support.

Spring Integration Update - Josh Long This session provides a guided tour of the new features of Spring Integration 2.0 including the new Spring Integration ROO add-on. Along the way, you will learn about Spring Integration's support for Spring Framework 3.0 features such as the Spring Expression Language, ConversionService, and RestTemplate. You will also learn about several new adapters including AMQP, XMPP, TCP/UDP, JDBC, JMX, and more.

Tuning Java for Virtual Environments - Ben Corrie This practical session looks in detail at how to get the best performance out of the JVM when running virtual, with particular focus on memory management. While the session will spend some time looking at the existing best practice and the technical reasons behind that, it will also present the most up-to-date data and recommendations along with a forward-looking perspective of the work SpringSource is doing to enhance Java on virtual.

Cloud Foundry for Spring Developers - Josh Long Cloud Foundry, the new open source Platform-as-a-Service from VMware, provides a fantastic deployment platform to run Spring applications in an auto-scaling, auto-managed cloud environment. This presentation describes how to leverage cloud services, like MongoDB, Redis, and RabbitMQ, and illuminates the architectural details behind Java execution on Cloud Foundry.

Apache Tomcat 7 Update - Mark Thomas Apache Tomcat is the mostly widely deployed application server in today's enterprise market. Developers, QA teams and IT managers all use Tomcat in a wide variety of deployments with incredible success. This session looks inside the popular Apache project to analyze the new features avaiable in Apache Tomcat 7, including asynchronous request processing, memory leak detection/prevention and security enhancements.

Spring AMQP and Rabbit Messaging - Dave Syer The Spring AMQP project's goal is to simplify development of messaging applications based on the AMQP protocol. Spring AMQP provides portable Java and .NET API across RabbitMQ and Apache Qpid implementations as well as convenient abstractions that promote a POJO based programming model. If you are familiar with Spring's JMS support, you will feel right at home. In this session you will take a tour of Spring AMQP features such as publishing, message converters, and creating multithreaded consumers. Support for the management of the RabbitMQ server will also be covered as well as its configuration using Spring.

Caching and Scalable Data Access with Gemfire - Costin Leau A pragmatic look on how to achieve easy gains in a Spring applications through caching. This session will analyze the usual bottlenecks found in common application stacks and ways to address them. Various caching patterns will be discussed, with focus not just on performance but also scalability, including how to get the best out of vFabric Gemfire.

Grails in the Cloud - Peter Ledbrook This presentation will survey the various cloud runtime platforms that provide Grails support and discuss the design constraints inherent in each platform. The session will provide concreate recommendations for designing your Grails applications to get the most out of these new deployment targets.

Tuning Grails Applications - Peter Ledbrook Grails makes it incredibly easy to get a web application up and running, but it makes no guarantees about how well that application will perform and scale. If you issue hundreds of database queries per request, your application won't be a Speedy Gonzalez. Find out how to track down and fix bottlenecks in various parts of your application, particularly database access and view rendering.

Dear Spring Community,

We're pleased to announce the new release 2.7.0 of the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS).

Some highlights from this release:

• Ships on top of Eclipse Indigo (3.7)
• Includes Mylyn 3.6 and EGit 1.0
• Updated template projects
• Support for Grails 1.4.M1
• Grails-aware rename type refactoring
• Groovy-Eclipse 2.5.1, which includes support for Groovy 1.8 and DSL IDE support (DSLDs)
• Support for Gradle

More details on new features and bug fixes can be found in the New and Noteworthy document. Detailed installation instructions are also available.

As always downloads are available from the STS download page.

Web applications typically rely heavily on what we call static resources, such as Javascript, CSS and image files. In a Grails application, they are put into a project's web-app directory and then referenced from the HTML. For example,

<link rel="stylesheet" href="${resource(dir: 'css', file: 'main.css')}" type="text/css">

will create a link to the file web-app/css/main.css. All very straightforward. You might even think that the current support is more than sufficient for anyone's needs. What else would you want to do?

That's a good point. The answer depends on the complexity of your application, but let's start with the example CSS link above. Why do we have to type out the <link rel="..." href=...>? Just by looking at the extension, we know that the resource is a CSS file. We also know that CSS files should be linked into an HTML page using the…

Welcome back to another installment of "This Week in Spring."

Lots of great stuff this week, as usual. When we compile this list, we trawl the internet looking for interesting stuff and try to bring it to you, digest style, in this weekly roundup. Some of the resources that we commonly check are Twitter, the SpringSource blogs, CloudFoundry.org, and Tomcat Expert,

We try to not miss anything, but we might. If you know of something that we've missed or think should be included, don't hesitate to ping your humble editors with any suggestions.

While SpringSource has a strong presence at numerous conferences and industry events, the premiere conference for Spring developers remains the SpringOne conference, held yearly in the United States. Work is well underway in planning the final program. Check out the SpringOne 2GX page to see news and activity, and to register, for the upcoming SpringOne2GX conference.

<LI><a href="http://www.springsource.org/spring-social/news/1.0.0.rc1-released">Spring Social 1.0.0.RC1</a…

Dear Spring Community,

I'm pleased to announce that the 1.5.0 GA release of Spring BlazeDS Integration, the open source solution for building Spring-powered RIAs with Adobe Flex, is now available.

Download | Reference Documentation | JavaDocs | Changelog

This release includes just a few bug-fixes needed since the release candidate. To recap from the previous milestone releases, the major features included in 1.5.0 are:

• Enhanced AMF serialization support, with proper handling of Hibernate lazy properties and collections, the option to use direct field mapping instead of property-based mapping, and support for specifying alternate constructors to default no-arg constructor.
  
  
• A major refactoring of the Spring Security support, resulting in easier integration of Flex apps with various Spring Security features such as Remember Me, Session Fixation Protection, and Concurrent Session Control.
  
  
• Easier customization and namespace-supported configuration of framework-provided services such as the LoginCommand and MessageInterceptors.
  
  
• Support for reading and writing AMF content with RESTful Spring MVC @Controllers. This serves as a nice alternative to the direct RPC approach of the Remoting Service, reducing duplication of effort in applications that need to support multiple client types. (See the updated Test Drive for usage examples.)
  
  
• Upgraded minimum dependencies to Spring 3.0, BlazeDS 4.0, Spring Security 3.0, and Spring Integration 2.0
  
  
• A complete revision of the Maven-based Test Drive samples, including an update across the board to use Flex 4, and a new sample to demonstrate the RESTful programming model.

As always, I encourage anyone interested to get involved by trying out the release and giving us feedback in the community forum and Jira. We continually get great feedback from people having success with Spring BlazeDS Integration in their projects, and we look forward to hearing more about your experiences.

We are pleased to announce that Spring AMQP for Java 1.0 RC2 is now available.

For details about the changes since RC1, please review the Release Notes here

In addition to a few bug fixes, this release provides the following:

• Support for Exchange-to-Exchange bindings as well as custom Exchange types
• Improved re-connection support
• Added ChannelListener callback
• Clarified Binding builder API semantics
• Added a MessageProperties conversion strategy interface
• Improved namespace coverage (e.g. <rabbit:template>)
• Upgraded to RabbitMQ client version 2.5.0

Since this is intended to be our final pre-GA release, please take some time to try it out. In fact if you have a chance, really try to push the limits so that we know we're ready for prime time.

Thanks!
The Spring AMQP Team

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the first release candidate of the Spring Social project is now available!

The Spring Social project allows you to connect your Java applications to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as Facebook and Twitter.

This release includes:

• Additions to the Facebook API binding such as photo and video upload, Facebook page support, and Facebook search.
• Expansion of the Twitter API binding to include mobile notifications, blocking, and geo location operations.
• Implicit sign up support enabling automatic sign up of a user from a connection.
• A new quickstart showing how to get up and running quickly.
• Numerous bug fixes and other improvements based on user feedback (see the changelog for details).

Also, with this release we have extracted the provider modules (Twitter, Facebook, etc) into their own projects so they can progress at a separate schedule from the main Spring Social project. Coinciding with the release of Spring Social 1.0.0.RC1, Spring Social Twitter and Facebook 1.0.0.RC1 are also now available.

To get the software, download the release distribution (Core | Facebook | Twitter) or simply add the maven artifacts to your project. To see it live, run through the quickstart and spin up the showcase app (recently updated for 1.0.0.RC1). Supplement as you go with information from the reference manual.

Spring Social requires Spring Framework 3.0.5 or > to run. We recommend Spring 3.1 for new applications to take advantage of the latest advances in the core framework. See the reference manual for a full description of dependencies.

It is awesome to see the community interest in extending Spring Social to work with numerous SaaS providers. Check out Matt Wright's work on Instagram and Foursquare and Morten Andersen-Gott's Yammer extension. Work on LinkedIn, Github, TripIt, and Gowalla has also started. We're committed to working with the community to build an ecosystem of quality Spring Social extensions. If you're integrating a SaaS API into your application, consider contributing to the Spring Social project. Have a look at our guide to extending Spring Social and discuss with the development team at our forum.

As we push toward a GA release, we would like to hear you think of the RC1 release. Participate in the forum or, if you have any suggestions or find any bugs, post them in the issue tracker. We hope you enjoy using Spring Social!

Welcome back to yet another This Week in Spring. SpringSource is out in full force at JAX San Jose this week and we will be at OSCON, in July. These events are great avenues for us to connect with the userbase. As usual, we've got a nice complement of stuff to cover this week, so let's get to it!

      <LI>  There has been loads of interest and discussion surrounding last week's <a href="http://blog.springsource.com/2011/06/09/spring-framework-3-1-m2-released/">Spring 3.1 second milestone</a>.  Sam Brannen writes about the <a href="http://blog.springsource.com/2011/06/21/spring-3-1-m…