After last week's release of Spring 3.1, there is some great material to help you get up to speed with the new enhancements. InfoQ has published another talk from SpringOne 2GX 2010, this one covers the Configuration Enhancements in Spring 3.1. Chris Beams covers unified property management, bean definition profiles, nested elements, c: namespace, Grails BeanBuilder integration.

Also last week Juergen Hoeller gave a webinar on the Spring 3.1 milestone release. In case you can were not able to attend in person, a full recording of the webinar has now been posted so you can get all of the details from the source!

Also don't forget to read Chris's recent blog post about Bean Definition Profiles. This is the first in a short series that will be covering the details of the new release.

Yet another session from SpringOne 2GX 2010 has been posted by InfoQ. This time it is Mark Fisher and Oleg Zhurakousky who are presenting on What's New in Spring Integration 2.0.

Mark and Oleg use code-centric demos to describe how Spring 3.0 features have been integrated in Spring Integration, what enterprise integration patterns have been implemented and where channel adapters and gateways have been updated. They demonstrate the new STS tooling support for Spring Integration and discuss some of the future features and direction for the project.

This presentation is a great way to get introduced to Spring Integration 2.0. The GA release of 2.0 followed less than one month after this talk so all the topics covered are up to date with the current release. Again many thanks to InfoQ for covering SpringOne 2GX 2010.

Dear Spring community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring Web Services 2.0 Release Candidate 2 has been released!

This is the second release candidate in the 2.0 release cycle. The most important new feature in this release is the update of the Spring-WS XML namespace, which now contains <sws:annotation-driven/> and <sws:interceptors/> elements (similar to the Spring-MVC namespace), and <sws:static-wsdl/> and <sws:dynamic-wsdl/> for exporting your WSDLs. All of these features are described in the updated reference documentation.

We consider this release (RC2) complete. If no major new issues are found, we will release 2.0.0-RELEASE in the first half of January 2011.

While we did make some changes, Spring-WS 2.0 should be a drop-in replacement for 1.5 with just one exception. Please read the forum post for the details.

Download | Documentation | ChangeLog | Community Forum

We have recently released updates for several components of the vFabric Cloud Application Platform. As Rod Johnson mentioned in the original announcement, vFabric is designed for fast delivery of next-generation applications that are instantly scalable and cloud-portable. These recent updates further enhance the integration between runtime application services and improve the performance, scalability, monitoring and manageability of modern applications.

vFabric tc Server 2.1

Updates to vFabric tc Server continue to make it the best place to build and run Spring applications: 

• Spring Insight
  Included with tc Server 2.1, Spring Insight delivers real-time visibility into application behavior and performance for Spring applications during development and pre-production.  Deep real-time visibility into application behavior can now be persisted to view information spanning a previous time range.  Improvements to administration and navigation make it easy to operate and surface useful information more intuitively.
• Enhanced templating
  A new built-in template mechanism simplifies the configuration of tc Server with the vFabric GemFire HTTP Session Management and Hibernate Cache Modules.  This allows vFabric GemFire to automatically launch with tc Server 2.1 – no application code changes or other manual intervention is required.

vFabric GemFire 6.5

vFabric GemFire is the distributed data management platform for modern applications offering dynamic scalability, very high performance and database-like persistence. Two new modules simplify the integration of GemFire with tc Server and Hibernate delivering sophisticated data management for modern applications. Jags Ramnarayan goes into great detail in his latest blog post but we will provide a quick overview here.

• vFabric GemFire HTTP Session Management Module
  The vFabric GemFire HTTP Session Management Module offloads and manages HTTP session state for tc Server or Tomcat servers.   Pre-configured and automatically launching with tc Server, GemFire HTTP Session Management provides high performance and scalability.  This is particularly useful for web applications handling many requests and that need to scale-out to meet demand.
  
  • Decouple session management from tc Server or Tomcat Servlet/JSP container
  • Scale application server and HTTP session handling independently
  • Handle very large sessions without losing sessions
  • Easy to connect to tc Server via new template mechanism or Tomcat via minor configuration modifications
• vFabric GemFire Hibernate Cache Module
  The vFabric GemFire Hibernate Cache Module provides fast, scalable, distributed L2 caching for Hibernate. Swapnil Bawaskar covers the details in his latest blog post.
  • Dramatically improve Hibernate performance
  • Reduce network traffic (and potential bottlenecks) to the database server
  • Gain all the enterprise class features of GemFire
  • Scalability – partition data across the entire cluster
  • Developer productivity & cloud-scale deployment

vFabric Hyperic  4.5

vFabric Hyperic is the application management and monitoring component of the vFabric Cloud Application Platform and it provides complete and continuous visibility into the entire virtualized application stack. Jennifer Hickey recently described the internal details about the Hyperic 4.5 release…

Just in case you missed it, last week Mark Fisher announced that Spring Integration 2.0 is now GA. There is a "What's new in Spring Integration 2.0?" section in the reference manual that serves as a great starting point for existing 1.0 users and provides several links to the relevant sections within the manual where the new features are explained in detail. Mark's blog also covers the appropriate Maven POM entries and a sample application for the community to try.

There is also a recent webinar entitled Message-Driven Architecture with Spring that includes a fairly broad overview of Spring's support for ApplicationEvents, JMS, AMQP, Task Execution, and Scheduling. Also covered is a demo showing many adapters: REST, SOAP, email, XMPP, and Twitter. The webinar is highly recommended for anyone who wants to learn as much as they can, in just one hour, about Spring Integration and how it fits within the Spring platform.

Download | Reference Manual | Webinar | Forum | Issue Tracker

Lost somewhere in all the news and excitement about last week's SpringOne 2GX conference was the news that Spring 3.0.5 is now available. This release addresses over 80 minor issues and includes some small improvements to the Spring Expression Language (SpEL), annotation support, and embedded databases. 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 community,

We're pleased to announce that Spring ActionScript 1.1 is now available.

Download | API Documentation | HTML Docs | Changelog

Besides a series of bugfixes, this release adds the following new features and enhancements:

• Component Scanning & Context XML Namespace
• Test Framework
• PostConstruct, PreDestroy and Inject Metadata

Details about the release are include in the Spring ActionScript blog. Community members can always ask questions in the community forum and identify issues in JIRA as well.

Just some of the properties of new, modern applications are that they tend to be highly interactive, data rich, include business processes, and are available over the web from PCs and mobile devices. Powering these applications are platforms that leverage virtualized infrastructure, provide just the right amount of functionality and can scale easily as demand shifts.

VMware’s vFabric Cloud Application Platform is just such a platform designed to run Spring applications most efficiently and deliver the modern application experience. An essential component of this platform is vFabric GemFire. vFabric GemFire in-memory distributed data management brings data to applications with low latency, high reliability and linear, dynamic scalability. We are pleased to announce vFabric GemFire version 6.5…

Dear community,

We're pleased to announce that Spring ActionScript 1.0 is now available.

Download | API Documentation | HTML Docs | Changelog

Spring ActionScript is an offshoot of the Java Spring Framework written in ActionScript 3.0. The framework contains the following core features:

• Inversion of Control container, configurable with XML or MXML
• EventBus supporting loose communication between application components
• Metadata/annotation processing used for autowiring, event handling, ...
• Operation, Command and Task API
• Utilities for abstracting server communication
• Support for Modules
• Extensions for the Cairngorm and PureMVC frameworks

The Spring Actionscript team would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who took the time to report bugs, give suggestions and help out in any other kind of way. Without the dedicated Spring community behind us, the framework would not be where it is today. Thank all of you!

As always, we're on the look out for new members to join the team. If…

Great news for everyone interested in advanced, scalable, enterprise and cloud messaging! The RabbitMQ team has just released a brand new version, RabbitMQ 2.0, of their popular messaging server. The release includes an all new scalable storage engine, native support for multi-protocol messaging, improvements to plugin distribution and much more.

Download | Documentation | Release Notes | Blog

Spring Community members can use the new Spring AMQP project for both Java and .NET connectivity to RabbitMQ. RabbitMQ and Spring AMQP will be among the incredible technical content featured at SpringOne 2GX 2010 in Chicago, October 19th-21st. Be sure to register now to lock in an early registration discount.