Just days ago, SpringSource Tool Suite™ (STS) 2.9.1 was released. Besides many new features, it provides several features that are especially exciting for Spring Integration users. First of all, the latest STS release adds support for Spring Integration 2.1 and improves the visualization capabilities for Spring Integration flows. STS supports now all recently added Spring Integration adapters such as:

• Redis
• Gemfire
• AMQP
• Stored Procedure

Also, all existing Spring Integration adapters have been updated to support new visualization elements. Another wonderful addition to Spring Integration users is that SpringSource Tool Suite 2.9.x now ships with templating support for Spring Integration. Thus, when creating a new project using the Spring Template Project Wizard, you can now select between the following 3 new Spring Integration targeted templates:

• Spring Integration Project (Standalone) - Simple
• Spring Integration Project (Standalone) - File
• Spring Integration Project (War)

The Simple template creates a basic Spring Integration project, which runs as a standalone Java application, using only core Spring Integration components. In order to illustrate File polling capabilities, the File template uses additional components to poll file directories as well as to route those files. Lastly, the War template allows users to easily create basic Spring Integration projects that are targeted to run within servlet containers (e.g. Tomcat) as part of a WAR deployment. For illustration purposes the War template uses the Spring Integration Twitter adapter.

Creating a new Spring Integration Project

In order to start a new project using STS Spring Templates, go in the main menu to File, then NEW and then Spring Template Project. The Template Selection Screen will show up next.

 

[caption id="attachment_10681" align="aligncenter" width="342" caption="The Template Selection Screen"][/caption]

This screen provides a list of all available Spring Templates, including the 3 previously mentioned new templates for Spring Integration. If you see that little arrow in front of the template name - that means that the actual template has not been downloaded, yet. Once downloaded, the Templates will be cached on your machine and you won’t need to download the template files again, unless you press the Refresh…

Apache Maven is a very popular choice in the Java community for building and deploying applications.  The Cloud Foundry team has released the Cloud Foundry Maven Plugin to integrate with applications’ development lifecycle, including deployment to the cloud.  The same Maven plugin can be used to manage application pushes and updates to any Cloud Foundry instance.

One of Cloud Foundry’s main promises is to make your life as a developer a whole lot easier without limiting available choices. Cloud Foundry not only supports a plethora of languages (Java, Groovy, Scala, Ruby etc.) and frameworks (Spring, Grails, Rails, Sinatra, Lift etc.) but it also allows you to deploy your applications to different environments. This includes public clouds, such as Cloudfoundry.com and AppFog.com, partner-provided cloud offerings, single VM Micro Cloud Foundry…