There are less than two weeks to save $200 off the registration for SpringOne 2GX 2011! SpringOne 2GX is a one-of-a-kind conference for application developers, solution architects, web operations and IT teams who develop business applications, create multi-device aware web applications, design cloud architectures, and manage high performance infrastructure. The sessions are specifically tailored for developers using the Spring technologies, Groovy & Grails, and Tomcat. The recent releases of Platform as a Service solutions from multiple vendors (including VMware's Cloud Foundry technology) will be a central focus of many of the technical sessions and will provide developers with the optimal blueprints for the cloud. Whether you're building and running mission-critical business applications or designing the next killer cloud application, SpringOne 2GX will keep you up to date with the latest enterprise technology.

Be sure to register today to lock in this $200 discount.

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.

Today the VMware team released Micro Cloud Foundry, a complete, local version of the popular, open source Platform as a Service that lets developers run a full featured cloud on their Mac or PC. Using Micro Cloud Foundry developers can build end-to-end cloud applications locally, without the hassles of configuring middleware while preserving the choice of where to deploy and the ability to scale their applications without changing a line of code.

Micro Cloud Foundry is available as a free downloadable virtual machine image and is compatible with VMware Fusion for Mac OS X and VMware Workstation and VMware Player (available as a free download) for Linux and Windows computers. It provides easy installation, setup, and virtual machine management and all you need is a Cloud Foundry account to get started.

Josh Long has created a getting started guide for Spring developers and produced a simple video tutorial.

Be sure to thumbs up the presentation if you find it useful and subscribe to the SpringSourceDev channel to receive updates about all the latest presentation recordings and screencasts.

The What's Next conference in Paris in May was one of the biggest Java events ever organized in France, energizing the vibrant French developer community. It gathered a lot of the most important Java experts from around the world to discuss at a high level the important new and emerging technologies around the Java platform.

SpringSource's Adrian Colyer had the opportunity to present to the audience and he discussed the current trends in cloud computing, covering especially PaaS with a reference at Cloud Foundry, and focusing on how PaaS impacts enterprise application design and development.

Many thanks to InfoQ who were on hand to capture the presentation.

Mark Thomas discusses all the latest features that are available in Apache Tomcat 7. He talks about the specification changes (Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2, Expression Language 2.2) some of the new features (JMX enhancements, performance improvements, new parallel deployment) and describes the upcoming plans for later releases. Check out the video or you can download the slides from the S2G Forum 2011 archive.

Be sure to thumbs up the presentation if you find it useful and subscribe to the SpringSourceDev channel to receive updates about all the latest presentation recordings and screencasts.

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.

May's well underway and all the preparations for the S2G Forums in Amsterdam and London are complete. These S2G Forums are the premiere place for people in Europe to get access to the best information related to the Spring community (at a minimum cost!). I hope we'll see you in Amsterdam (May 26, 2011 - € 114 ) and / or London (May 31, 2011 - £ 99)!

In the interim, those of you that want an even better picture of how the Spring framework plays on the nascent CloudFoundry open-source cloud PaaS project should be sure to attend a webinar - Spring from Zero to Cloud in 60 minutes for both North America and Europe in just 10 short days!

1. SpringSource Tool Suite 2.6.1 Released. This release features the usual updates and features. Some particularly notable features: an updated bundled version of vFabric tc Server, version 2.5, improved support for tc Server instance creation and an update to the latest release of Spring Roo, version 1.1.3 and (yay!) bundled support for CloudFoundry. Check out the New and Noteworthy PDF document for the details.

	<li> The  <A HREF="http://blog.cloudfoundry.com/">CloudFoundry blog</a> has run two different parts with a detailed look at  what happens when you <code>push</code> applications to the CloudFoundry project. The first post details what happens from the <a href="http://blog.cloudfoundry.com/post/4737632136/what-happens-when-you-vmc-push-an-application-to-cloud">client-side perspective</a>. The second post provides details on what happens from <a href="http://blog.cloudfoundry.com/post/5223861703/how-cloud-foundry-works-when-a-new-application-is">the cloud-side perspective, once the…

Another great week for good, deep content. Most of the items on the list this week are best enjoyed with a nice cup of coffee and a nice, comfy chair. :-) Enjoy!

1. SpringSource will be presenting a free webinar - Getting Started with Spring and SpringSource Tool Suite - this Thursday. The presentation will give experienced folks a look at some of the new methodologies, and will give newcomers to the technology a chance to get started with it and move quickly into productive application development. Additionally, attendees will have a chance to ask questions of the presenter and panelists. The webinar will be presented twice, once for Europe, and once for North America. I hope to see you there!
2. Spring MVC lead Keith Donald's video introducing Spring MVC 3 from SpringOne2GX is up on InfoQ.com. Great video with lots of information in just 90 short minutes. Check it out!
3. Craig Walls posts this week on Extending Spring Social's Service Provider Framework, this time introducing an example integration with the Netflix API. Very informative post, and inspiring - I couldn't help but have exciting ideas for applications pop into my head when I was reading it.

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4. This VMware whitepaper provides a pretty good look at the migrating from a Java EE application server to the leaner, more powerful SpringSource tcServer. It makes for some fascinating reading - and highlights some very interesting information. Check it out!

	<li>The whitepaper exploring a migration from a Java EE application to tcServer has a companion <a href="http://java.sys-con.com/node/1750240">in this VMware</a> whitepaper,  that talks about the migration from Tomcat to tcServer. Pretty exciting!

5. This blog post introduces high thoroughput, asynchronous Servlet 3.0 applications. The post is useful for people using Tomcat or tcServer, particularly, because they represent the largest Servlet 3.0-compatible install base, by far.

More content has been posted by InfoQ covering the talks from SpringOne 2GX 2010. This time is it Spring in Action author, Craig Walls, talking about Developing Social-Ready Web Applications.

Craig covers:

• The types of social integration possible for your Spring applications
• How to access social data via REST
• How to secure social data in appropriate ways to protect your users
• The features available in the Spring Social project to support social integration within the Spring idiom.

Once again, many thanks to InfoQ for covering SpringOne 2GX 2010 and providing this outstanding presentations to the community.

InfoQ has released another talk from SpringOne 2GX 2010, this one covers Groovy.DSLs (from: beginner, to: expert). In this presentation, Groovy experts Guillaume Laforge and Paul King give a detailed introduction and practical guide to using Groovy to create your domain specific languages.

Guillaume and Paul Mark provide:

• A myriad of DSL examples from specialized computing requirements to general business tasks
• Characteristics to keep in mind when creating your own DSL
• Details about Groovy's DSL advantages including flexible and malleable syntax, runtime meta-programming, regular expression pre-processing as well as being a Java based runtime
• Pitfalls and problems to avoid with concrete examples

Many thanks to InfoQ for covering SpringOne 2GX 2010 and providing this outstanding presentations to the community.