Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! This week I'm going to be in Los Angeles, talking to developers at Disney about Spring. If you're in the area, I'd love to see you all there, too. We're hosting a user-group meeting on December 11th. Here are some details on the event, which takes place tomorrow! I look forward to seeing you there!

Can you believe we're already staring down the end of the year? @_@

That means it's time for the annual release of Spring Framework, 4.0! We look forward to your feedback on the release.

Speakers: Yann Cébron (JetBrains) and Josh Long (Pivotal)

In this webinar, Yann Cébron (JetBrains) is joined by our guest Josh Long (Pivotal). Together, they will highlight the new features for Spring support included in these major releases that will help you to be more productive. We will be performing hands-on demonstrations so you'll be able to pick up some useful productivity tips & tricks for your daily work. Last but not least, we will share some insight into future plans for Spring support in IntelliJ IDEA. IntelliJ IDEA 13 will be released in early December, and Spring 4.0 is just around the corner too. Don't miss this opportunity to see and hear about the latest features and have your questions answered on the spot.

In celebration of Spring Framework 4.0 launch, Pivotal is excited to sponsor Manning's "Countdown to 2014" and their "Day of Spring / Groovy / Grails", a joint promotion with Manning Publications where we offer 50% discounts for specific days, on books that are hand-picked by the Spring, Groovy, Grails folks at Pivotal. Manning is also making an additional offer to anyone that purchases the Deal of the Day - they are automatically entered to win one free copy of an eBook and one chance to win an iPad mini!

Speaker: Rob Winch

Spring Security is a powerful and highly customizable authentication and access-control framework and is the de-facto standard for securing Spring-based applications. Whether you are itching to learn how to use Spring Security for the first time or you want to learn about all the new features in Spring Security 3.2 this presentation is a must.

In this talk Rob, the Spring Security project lead, will take you on a guided tour of how to get up and running with Spring Security 3.2's new features including:

Speaker: Juergen Hoeller

The Spring Framework re-invented enterprise Java in the last decade. Together with the rest of the upcoming Spring IO micro platform, a new Spring Framework generation will power the next decade of JVM-based innovation.

Join Juergen Hoeller to learn about Spring Framework 4.0, its refined annotation-based component and configuration model, and how it relates to Java 8, Java EE 7, Groovy, WebSockets, as well as Spring Boot and Spring Integration.

Thursday, January 9, 2014 3:00pm GMT Time (London GMT) Register

As the first milestone of the Spring Data release train Codd has now cooled down a little bit, I'd like to highlight some of the new features shipped with the MongoDB module.

SpEL support for projections in aggregation framework

Sometimes it can be pretty complicated to define arithmetic expressions within MongoDB aggregation framework projections.

Assume a part of an aggregation for an order is the gross price of it, effectively calculated using the following formula: (netPrice * discountRate + fixedCharge) * taxRate. With a discount rate of 0.8, a fixed charge of 1.2 and a tax rate of 1.19, the according DBObject to encode this formula with the MongoDB aggregation framework looks as follows:

With the recent RC2 release of Spring Framework 4.0; and GA due before the year's end, here is a little teaser of some of the changes that should improve your life if you work with Java generic types.

Spring has had pretty good Java generics support for a while. For example, with version 3.2 you can easily inject all beans of a specific type into a generic List just by using the @Autowired annotation:

@Autowired
private List<MyType> beans; 
// all beans that extends MyType will be injected

Spring's conversion service, binding system and Web MVC framework are all 'generic aware' and there are also the handy GenericCollectionTypeResolver and GenericTypeResolver utility classes that you can use in your own code.

Spring 4.0 RC2 has been released and is now available from the SpringSource repository.

This will be the final release candidate before GA, so please give it a try and let us know if you find any issues.

If you are Maven user you may be interested in the new "bill of materials" POM that we have published with this release. You can import the spring-framework-bom project in your dependency management section to ensure that you get consistent Spring Framework dependencies. This is particularly useful when you work with other projects that may have transitive dependencies to earlier versions of Spring.

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Sofia, Bulgaria, talking to the great folks at the amazing Java2Days conference. This is my 5th year here and it's been an amazing show every time!

1. Spring Integration 3.0 RC1 is now available! The new release features many nice, new features including a file-tailing inbound adapter, a JMX inbound adapter, redis queues, and much more.
2. Don't miss Matt Stine as he discusses Spring with Immutability on Dec 10th!
3. The replay of my webinar from last week, Have You Seen Spring Lately?, is now available online! The talk is a sort of introduction to the Spring IO platform, introducing many of the awesome technology released since the Spring team became part of Pivotal. It also introduces some new tech inside of Spring 4, as well as some oldies-but-goodies like Spring Social and Spring Batch, which continue to grow.
4. Ben Hale's epic talk from SpringOne2GX 2013 which introduces REST API Design is now available online.
5. Looking to get started quickly with Spring and application development? Check out this webinar replay of the SpringOne2GX 2013 talk introducing Spring Boot!
6. InfoQ has a great post on how to use Spring Boot in conjunction with the Aerospike database
7. Want to integrate a custom single-sign on authentication provider using Spring Security? This Stack Overflow discussion on integrating a custom single sign-on provider is very helpful! (I got this from the always-useful @SpringTip Twitter account)
8. Xavier Padró's put together a nice post on how Spring Integration error handling works.
9. Sergi Almar (@SergiAlmar) has put together a really great presentation on using Spring 4's websocket support. Definitely check it out!
10. Also from @SpringTip, a great Stack Overflow post on how to filter database records using Spring Data REST and Spring MVC
11. Nicolas Frankel is back at it again, this time with a nice post on using Spring Data SOLR

Speakers: Dr. David Syer and Phil Webb

Are you an impatient programmer who wishes the keyboard could keep up with you? If you've ever wished Java and Spring could do more to keep up, then this is the place to be. We present Spring Boot, a toolkit and runtime platform that will get you up and running with Spring-powered, production-grade applications and services faster than you believed possible. The goals are:

• Radically faster and widely accessible getting started experience for Spring development
• Be opinionated out of the box, but get out of the way quickly as requirements start to diverge from the defaults
• Provide a range of non-functional features that are common to large classes of projects (e.g. embedded servers, security, metrics, health checks, externalized configuration)
• First class support for REST-ful services, modern web applications, batch jobs, and enterprise integration
• Applications that adapt their behavior or configuration to their environment
• Optionally use Groovy features like DSLs and AST transformations to accelerate the implementation of basic business requirements