Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the first milestone release 3.5.0.M1 of the Spring Tool Suite (STS) and the Groovy/Grails Tool Suite (GGTS).

Highlights from this milestone build include:

• improved new dashboard (news feeds are back)
• new advanced content-assist for Spring Boot projects
• support for new client side getting started guides
• support for Groovy 2.2
• updated to Grails 2.3.4
• updated to tc Server 2.9.4

Both tool suites ship on top of the latest Eclipse Kepler SR1 release.

To download the distributions, please go visit:

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.

Speaker: Pieter Humphrey (Martin Lippert)

A walk through of the new spring.io getting started guide, importing a spring.io guide into STS, building a simple, parameterized, robust REST web service in about 6 minutes using Spring Boot, Spring Tool Suite, and Spring Framework 4.0 Follow along at: https://spring.io/guides/gs/rest-service/

Learn more about Spring Tool Suite at http://www.spring.io/tools

Learn more about Spring Boot at http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot

Learn more about Spring Guides at http://www.spring.io/guides

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.

Speakers: Pieter Humphrey (Martin Lippert)

A short demo of building a Spring Boot runnable REST service, with Actuator support, as a Java Application in just a few seconds. Then we show enhancing it with a simple Hello World data structure and showing "Hello World" string return values to your browser, and a quick tour through Spring Boot's Actuator features.

Learn more about Spring Tool Suite at http://www.spring.io/tools

Learn more about Spring Boot at http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot

Learn more about Spring Guides at http://www.spring.io/guides

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.