Josh Long

Josh Long

Josh (@starbuxman) is the Spring Developer Advocate at Pivotal and a Java Champion. He's host of "A Bootiful Podcast" (https://soundcloud.com/a-bootiful-podcast), host of the "Spring Tips Videos" (http://bit.ly/spring-tips-playlist), co-author of 6+ books (http://joshlong.com/books.html), and instructor on 8+ Livelessons Training Videos (http://joshlong.com/livelessons.html)

Recent Blog posts by Josh Long

This Week in Spring - June 4, 2013

Engineering | June 05, 2013 | ...

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. The SpringOne2GX super early bird registration discount expires on June 10th, 2013, so make your arrangements now to secure the discount. Also, we've got three webinars coming up this month, check out the details below. As usual, we've got a lot to cover, so let's get to it!

  1. I'll be doing a webinar on building effective REST APIs with Spring on June 13th. I'll be introducing Spring's deep support for REST services, starting with Spring MVC and moving up the Richardson Maturity Model to incorporate Spring HATEOAS and, ultimately, Spring Data REST. Along the way we'll look at the REST shell, and other concerns like security through OAuth.
  2. Join Jon Brisbin as he introduces Reactor in a webinar on June 18th. Reactor provides a foundational framework for applications that need high throughput when performing reasonably small chunks of stateless, asynchronous processing.
  3. Join Tony Erksine from Liberty University on June 27th as he instructs us How to talk Spring and Influence People, a pragmatic lesson on soft skills and technology adoption strategies needed to help get other developers in your company excited about,a nd using, new technology -- in this case, with Spring.
  4. If you're in the bay area, be sure to check out JAXConf happening right now in Santa Clara. Admission is free and there are some great speakers there. I will be speaking there tomorrow on Spring 4, and Multi Client Development with Spring, so feel free to drop by if you'd like to talk Spring, Cloud Foundry and big-data.
  5. You probably saw Paul Chapman's awesome posts introducing Spring MVC's support for content negotiation last month and this month he's back with a post on content negotiation using Spring MVC views. Be sure to check both of them out, as they provide solid foundations for dealing with content negotiation in the ever increasing paradigm of REST.
  6. Our friend Petri Kainulainen continues his look at Spring Data SOLR and explains how to add custom repository methods to the implementations above and beyond what Spring Data already provides out of the box. This example is in the context of Spring Data SOLR but the approach is generic and works for all the repository implementations.
  7. RabbitMQ ninja Alvaro Videla has done an amazing job introducing RabbitMQ's power in the latest edition of Developer Magazine.
  8. Every now and then I run into old but cool content, like this project demonstrating how to build a Spring MVC application with Scala. As you might imagine, there's not much difference between Scala and Java, but this is nonetheless an interesting example. Check it out.
  9. I've been knee deep in REST, in preparation for my upcoming webinar, and I stumbled upon a great, albeit older, post by Apache Shiro PMC member and REST-ninja Lez Hazelwood on providing good client feedback on errors with REST in Spring MVC.
  10. Spring HATEOAS lead and Spring Data ninja Oliver Gierke did an amazing talk introducing Spring HATEOAS at Oredev last year and it's available online. Definitely be sure to check it out!
  11. Our pal Nicolas Fränkel is back, this time with a short rant on how to approach modularity in Spring configuration.
  12. JavaBeat has a nice post on how to handle themes in Spring MVC.
  13. The BitwiseOR blog has a nice post on how to setup a simple, working Spring MVC application.
  14. Alexey Zvolinskiy put together a nice, complete-with-code, post on how to use Spring Data JPA to build an application.
  15. David, from The small world for Yiyi blog, has put together a nice post on using PDF, XML and JSON from Spring MVC.
  16. Our pal Johnathan Mark Smith is back, this time with another video introducing how to use Spring's Java configuration

This Week in Spring - May 28, 2013

Engineering | May 29, 2013 | ...

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. In case you missed it last week, the vast majorty of the SpringOne2GX 2013 agenda has been published, so book now and get the early bird rate on the conference, and airfare! As usual, we've got a lot to cover this week, so let's get to it!

  1. Spring Batch lead Michael Minella announced Spring Batch 2.2.0 RC2. The new release is chalk full of great new features including support for the Spring Batch Java configuration API and a Spring Data GemFire ItemReader and ItemWriter.
  2. Gary Russell just announced Spring Integration 3.0 milestone 2. Be sure to check out the new features and kick the tires!
  3. Join me for a webinar on Building REST-ful Services with Spring - June 13th, 2013. I'll discuss OAUTH, Spring MVC and Spring HATEOAS as it relates to REST.
  4. Rossen Stoyanchev's blogged about the upcoming support for WebSockets in Spring 4 and it looks very compelling!
  5. Gary Russell also just announced the Spring Integration MQTT extension adapter, milestone 1, that makes it easy to work with MQTT - a messaging technology that lends itself to lightweight messaging - from Spring Integration.
  6. Oliver Gierke has written up a great response to the question, how do I return a Spring Data page as JSON on Stack Overflow.
  7. Long-time readers of this roundup will know about Thymeleaf, the templating engine that breathes new life into your web application view templates and that works really well with Spring. The first, stable 2.0.0 version of Thymeleaf-testing has just been released.
  8. Joris Kuipers, on the Trifork blog, has announced a new set of macros for doing form inputs with Spring applications using Freemarker, an alternative - and very powerful - templating engine.
  9. Oleg Tsal-Tsalko put together a talk on the new bits in Spring 4. Nicely done, Oleg!
  10. Johnathan Mark Smith is back at it again, this time with a video on how to do Java configuration with Spring. Check it out!
  11. Maciej Walkowiak put together a great post on how to audit entities using Spring Data MongoDB.
  12. The poorly-named Java2J2EE blog has a great, short-and-sweet post on how to setup JPA and Spring MVC with Spring's Java configuration style. I would however discourage users from calling the lifecycle methods on a Spring FactoryBean directly, and instead choose to dereference the configured result:
    @Bean public EntityManagerFactory emf(){
       LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean lcemfb = ..
       return lcemfb;
    } 
    
    @Bean public PlatformTransactionManager transactionManager(){
      EntityManagerFactory emf = emf().getObject();
      return new JpaTransactionManager( emf );
    } 
    
    

This Week in Spring - May 21, 2013

Engineering | May 22, 2013 | ...

This Week in Spring

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! We are finally running out of SpringOne2GX video recordings.. this is the last week in Spring that you'll see them, so refer back to the replays page for an index. As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it!

  1. Spring lead Juergen Hoeller just announced the release of Spring Framework 4.0 M1 and 3.2.3.RELEASE The 3.2.3 update mainly includes updates and fixes related to Java 8 support. The 4.0 milestone, on the other hand, is a look ahead to the many awesome features in Spring 4.0 including support for web sockets, Java EE 7, the @Conditional annotation (in the same vein as the @Profile annotation) and much more, so be sure to check it out!
  2. TcServer 2.9.2 is now available! The release contains security fixes and updates, for more details check out the release notes.
  3. Jennifer Hickey's talk -- Thinking outside the container - Standalone Applications on CloudFoundry has been released in HD on YouTube.
  4. Stephen Bohlen's talk --An Introduction to Spring.NET for Java developers, has been released in HD on YouTube.
  5. InfoQ has done a nice writeup of Spring HATEOAS
  6. Johnathan Mark Smith has put together a nice post on how to use Spring's Java configuration style.
  7. Xavier Padró has put together a nice post on how to communicate within a Spring Web Flow flow
  8. Static.com has announced their Hadoop and Cloud Foundry-powered service. Frankly, it looks really cool and cost-effective as a public platform on which to host applications that need a backoffice Hadoop solution.
  9. I can't believe I missed this! RabbitMQ 3.1.0 is out (slightly old news) and, to introduce it, you should check out this amazing RabbitMQ 3.1.0 in pictures.
  10. The HMKCode blog has a nice post on doing the not-so-well-documented, but common, things with a MyBatis, Spring and jUnit integration.
  11. The Java Code Geeks have put together a nice tutorial on how to process radio buttons in a form in Spring MVC.
  12. Gerry Tan has put together a nice blog on how to bind form date values with Spring MVC.

This Week in Spring - May 14, 2013

Engineering | May 15, 2013 | ...

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! Some rather exciting projects have been announced this week, and if you can believe it, we're almost out of SpringOne 2012 replay content! Good thing the SpringOne 2013 agenda grid is going live very soon, so we'll be able to look ahead. As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it!

In preparation for the agenda grid going live, a lot of new SpringOne 2013 sessions have been accepted:

  1. Jon Brisbin announced the Reactor project. The Reactor project aims to provide a solid foundation for asynchronous IO-based applications, on top of which it is natural to provide integrations for technologies like Grails and Spring. Reactor already features a good multi-language story with support for Groovy and Java (and, particularly, the upcoming Java 8 release!) Be sure to check this out, especially the comments section if you have questions about how this compares to other asynch technology!
  2. Spring Security lead Rob Winch has been busily enhancing the Spring Security and Spring Security OAuth Java Configuration story. He's got a first cut of the Spring Security OAuth Java Configuration API available, and I'm sure he'd appreciate any feedback on the new DSL, so definitely be sure to check it out! Nice work, Rob!
  3. Webinar on Thursday May 16th with Chris Richardson, author of POJOs in Action, on Decomposing Application for Deployability and Scalabilty. Register Now!
  4. Join Broadleaf Commerce's Andre Azzolini for a Webinar on Tuesday, May 28th as they discuss their Lessons Learned Moving from GWT to SpringMVC.
  5. Paul Chapman introduces some of the diverse support for content negotiation in Spring MVC on the SpringSource blog.
  6. Chris Harris's talk, the Spring Data MongoDB Project, from SpringOne2GX 2012 is now available in HD on YouTube!
  7. Lee Faus's talk, Extreme Makeover - Application Edition, from SpringOne2GX 2012 is now available HD on YouTube!
  8. The JIWHIZ blog, and blogger Yuan Ji, has put together a nice post introducing Spring's Java configuration support.
  9. This post - from blogger Chris Wong in a January post called "JmsTemplate is not evil" - explains some of the subtleties of using Spring's CachingConnectionFactory with a raw ConnectionFactory and then, for extra points, introduces one approach to dramatically speeding up ActiveMQ, in particular.
  10. The HMKcode blog has a nice, exhaustive post introducing how to use the jQuery-file-upload plugin with Spring MVC.
  11. Have you taken a look at HATEOAS yet? HATEOAS is a design pattern, an approach, for building better RESTful web services. Spring HATEOAS makes doing so dead simple atop Spring MVC, and this blog by Geraint Jones introduces Spring HATEAOS very nicely
  12. Blogger Alexey Zvolinskiy answers a common question: how do I bind checkboxes to the model object that's sent back and forth to the server in Spring MVC?
  13. Our friend @baeldung maintains a daily Twitter feed of awesome posts about Spring on StackOverflow, and I think he's dug up some absolutely amazing content. One post answers a question I am frequently asked: how do I enumerate all the Spring MVC @Controller-annotated beans at runtime?
  14. Another great post that I found while trawling through the @SpringAtSO handle was this post, explaining how to propagate request-scoped attributes beyond the thread of the current request. This post applies generally to any situation where a request-scoped attribute needs to propagate beyond its original thread and request.

This Week in Spring - 7 May, 2013

Engineering | May 07, 2013 | ...

Welcome to An Epic Week in Spring! Lots of new sessions have been posted to SpringOne Conference, so head over to the site and check out the featured sessions! We'll have the agenda grid online before the end of May.

Featured SpringOne2GX 2013 sessions accepted!

      <li><a href="http://www.springone2gx.com/conference/santa_clara/2013/09/session?id=29165">Tackling Big Data Complexity with Spring</a> (Mark Fisher and Mark Pollack)</li>
          <li><a href="http://www.springone2gx.com/conference/santa_clara/2013/09/session?id=29395">Reactor - an asynch  framework for distributed web and enterprise architectures</a> (Jon Brisbin)</li>
      
    • Spring for Snowboarders (Dave Syer and Phil Webb)

Many other new sessions accepted as well:

And now, back to our regularly scheduled week in Spring... as usual, we've got a lot to cover, so let's get to it!

  1. Juergen Hoeller and Marius Bogoevici's talk, Java EE services for Spring applications, from SpringOne2GX 2012 is now available in HD on YouTube!
  2. John Davies's talk, Spring Integration in the Wild, from SpringOne2GX 2012 is now available HD on YouTube!
  3. Kim Saabye Pedersen has written a small example on using @Transactional on an interface with Spring's transaction management infrastructure. Nice job, Kim!
  4. Would it be possible to take Spring Petclinic as it is now and scale it up to 1000 requests per second on a single server instance? Julien Dubois from Ippon Technologies has written a great series of five blog entries on that topic. If you missed them from the previous roundups, check out the whole series, starting here!
  5. Petri Kainulainen has written a great post introducing how to sort data using Spring Data SOLR.
  6. By the by, I know I've mentioned this before, but it really is handy. Have you checked out Alvaro Videla's RabbitMQ simulator?
  7. Spring Data ninja Oliver Gierke has written a great response to the question, How do I use Spring Data MongoDB in a multi-tenant fashion? Be sure to check it out. Generally, his advice is applicable to many such scenarios.
  8. Serkan ÖZAL has put together an awesome, bytecode-based RowMapper that can be used with Spring's JDBC infrastructure (like JdbcTemplate) and that can handle relationships like an ORM might. Because it's bytecode-based, it's very fast and not given to the same reflection-based performance limitations of Spring's own BeanPropertyRowMapper. I haven't tried this out yet, but it looks very promising!
  9. Our friend Roger Hughes is back with a tutorial (of two posts, thus far). The first, RESTful Ajax with Spring MVC, establishes an application (without REST and Ajax) and the second then introduces serializing data objects using Jackson, a JSON serializer.
  10. Bharat Sharma also wrote a nice post on serializing to JSON with Spring MVC this week!
  11. Blogger Kal wrote up a nice post on how Spring MVC simplifies file-uploads with Spring MVC and commons-fileupload.

This Week In Spring - April 30th, 2013

Engineering | April 30, 2013 | ...

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! We've got a lot to cover this week, as usual, so let's get to it. Did you miss last week's Pivotal public launch? Catch the replay and learn about GE's investment in the new entity! Pivotal's mission is about bringing consumer-grade software to the enterprise -- where open source technology like Spring, Groovy, Grails, RabbitMQ, Redis, and Cloud Foundry, are already widely adopted. Check out the new Pivotal website, under the Community link (top right) for some other open source initiatives that might surprise you!

  1. Oliver Gierke has announced Spring HATEOAS 0.5, which contains lots of new features!
  2. Spring Security lead Rob Winch has announced that Spring Security 3.1.4 is now available. This is a maintenance release with a number of bug fixes including OSGi support for Spring 3.2.
  3. Spring Data ninja Oliver Gierke also (boy that guy gets around!) tweeted a look at the Spring Data roadmap: introducing Spring Data "Babbage."
  4. Spring Data Arora SR1 released this week (named for Sanjeev Arora). As an aside, you have probably noticed that the names of the various Spring Data release trains are adapted from various influential names in computer science. The new release is named for Charles Babbage.
  5. Adam Shook and Dr. Mark Pollack's webinar, Hadoop, Pivotal HD and Spring for Apache Hadoop, is now available online.
  6. Gil Tene, of Azul Systems, gave an amazing talk at SpringOne2GX 2012 called Understanding Java Garbage Collection and what you can do about it, which is now online.
  7. New SpringOne2GX replays now available in HD on YouTube: Building for Performance with Spring Integration & Spring Batch, Case Study: Provisioning a Multi-Site In-Memory Database
  8. James Watters shared a video he'd discovered on setting up Cloud Foundry and BOSH. It's pretty epic and worth a watch if you want to get a handle on BOSH.
  9. What people write blog posts about sometimes surprises me. The Javarevisted blog has a nice post introducing Spring's (fairly internal, albeit stable) org.springframework.util.StringUtils class, with examples on how to convert collections to delimited strings. I think this is perhaps too much information on the subject, but I love the enthusiasm!
  10. RabbitMQ developer-advocate Alvaro Videla has put together a post on how to unit-test RabbitMQ from PHPUnit. This approach is pretty cool, though I wonder how well it would play in Java and jUnit with concurrent test suite execution. Either way, this is a nice way to unit test my favorite message queue!
  11. Do you need a Spring Integration adapter? Have you checked out the Spring Integration extensions repository? This repository simply collects adapters that move faster than the Spring Integration core, or that are still being polished. It's a great place to find solutions to various problems. Heck, even the pull requests are chock full of useful stuff - I see an MQTT adapter in there by the amazing Gary Russell!
  12. Check out this amazing post on @gopivotal blog called 800,000 Messages/Minute: How Nokia’s HERE Uses #RabbitMQ to Make Real-time Traffic Maps over on the @gopivotal blog. It introduces the Nokia HERE architecture that builds on Spring AMQP and RabbitMQ.

This Week in Spring - April 23rd, 2013

Engineering | April 23, 2013 | ...

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring! Here in San Francisco, we're experiencing the first fits of life and beautiful weather typical of spring time. Fitting, too, as things are busy-as-can-be in the Pivotal open source communities - including Cloud Foundry and SpringSource - as we march towards the Pivotal Initiative launch on April 24th. See you then!

Without further ado, let's get into this week's roundup:

  1. Have you guys seen the amazing Java configuration support in Spring Batch 2.2.0.RC1? The code I've just linked you to demonstrates a complete working Spring Batch job that reads in a .csv file and then writes the records to a data source, all of which are configured in the class, entirely in Java. This demonstrates the @EnableBatchProcessing annotation in 2.2.0. Check it out!
  2. New SpringOne2GX replays now available in HD on YouTube: Implementing Domain Driven Design with Spring and vFabric, Batch Processing and Integration on Cloud Foundry and a bonus session, Understanding Java Garbage Collection and what you can do about it.
  3. The FuzzyDB open source project tweeted that they'd released a new version of FuzzyDB with Spring Data bindings aligned with the Spring Data Arora release train. Congratulations, guys!
  4. Have you had a chance to play with Thymeleaf, the HTML5 and Spring MVC-friendly templating engine? If you'd like to learn even more, you'll probably like this presentation called Thymeleaf, Will it Blend?
  5. David Welch put together a quick demo of Spring Data Mongo and made the work available. He tweets that he went from working demo in 8 minutes with 4 classes and a pom.xml. Nice work man!
  6. Check out Ramnivas Laddad's awesome talk CloudFoundry Architecture talk at SpringOne2GX up live on the SpringSource YouTube channel SpringSourceDev.
  7. Spring HATEOAS lead Oliver Gierke tweeted a link to this post, "How I Explained REST to my wife", which would seem at first to be just one person's attempt at explaining a fairly deep technology concept to a person who didn't have the same technical background, but quickly turns into a (I think really insightful) look at the applicability of REST. Check out Spring HATEOAS if you want to take your REST-fu to the next level.
  8. I'm personally enamored of the new Java configuration APIs, both those recently released and those currently available in preview releases. I showed a very simple example of the Spring Batch API above. I also took a moment last week to write about the powerful Spring Social Java configuration API soon to be available in the 1.1.0.M2 release.
  9. You can have Spring perform a sort of pre-condition check by using the @Required annotation to insist at runtime that a property be satisfied with a non-null value, or Spring will abort the construction of the object. This helps avoid any silent NullPointerExceptions. This JavaBeat post does a nice job explaining how to use @Required.
  10. The how to do in java blog has a nice posting on how to create a custom UserDetailsService in Spring Security 3.
  11. The JavaCodeGeeks blog has a nice post on how to create RESTful services with Spring MVC.
  12. Brian's Java Blog has a nice post on using Spring AOP with both annotation and XML-centric configuration options.

This Week in Spring - April 16th, 2013

Engineering | April 16, 2013 | ...

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's been an exciting week for Spring at Pivotal, which you can hear more about at the re-scheduled Pivotal launch event on April 24th.

  1. In case you are reading too fast, Pivotal has re-scheduled the launch event to April 24th. Register here!
  2. Arjen Poutsma has announced Spring Web Services 2.1.3.RELEASE. The new release mainly consists of bug fixes, for the full details check out the changelog.
  3. Don't miss the upcoming Webinar with Donald Miner and Mark Pollack discussing Pivotal HD and Spring Hadoop, a good introductory webinar for those that are Pivotal HD-curious.
  4. New SpringOne2GX replays now available in HD on YouTube: Cloud Foundry Architecture, Effective Design Patterns in NewSQL
  5. There was a great post on Reddit the other day that explains the difference between REST and SOAP in terms of Martin Lawrence. This has nothing to do with Spring, but was droll enough that it's worth sharing.
      Spring, of course, has an amazing REST stack and I highly encourage people to check out how to build consolidated, streamlined REST services with Spring! Moving on... :) 
    
  6. James Rossiter has a good post on how to use a Spring InitBinder to Resolve Type Mismatch and bind Exceptions in POST from Spring MVC to Controller Actions.
  7. @olivergierke brings up a great point on Twitter: how much code does it take to add the JTA 1.2 JSR javax.transaction.Transactional annotation to Spring? Almost nothing! Most of the code here is just unit tests. Otherwise, this is just a dead simple mapping of the JTA annotation to Spring's already supported engine, which also currently supports the native Spring @Transactional and @javax.ejb.TransactionAttribute annotation.
  8. Are you looking into Gradle and want to get started with Spring, quickly? Giancarlo Frison has put together a nice post with a bootstrap Gradle build that can be used with Spring applications.
  9. Eugen Paraschiv has put together a nice post on how to use RestTemplate to do HTTP BASIC authentication.
  10. Spring has long supported a utility class, called the org.springframework.util.StopWatch, which can be used to measure the execution of method invocations. The Javarevisited blog has a
      <a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1rKtfP/javarevisited.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/how-to-measure-elapsed-execution-time.html">nice post on how to use the <CODE>StopWatch</code> class</a>.
    </LI>
    
  11. This post is fairly old, but I just stumbled upon it and thought it was a well thought out presentation introducing Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) in Spring.

This Week in Spring - April 9th, 2013

Engineering | April 09, 2013 | ...

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As usual, we've got a lot to cover, so let's get to it!

  1. SpringSource CTO Adrian Colyer outlines the direction and momentum of SpringSource and the Spring projects under the Pivotal Initiative, a new company spun out of EMC comprised of - among other things - SpringSource, Cloud Foundry, and GreenPlum. This is definitely worth a read if you want to understand Spring's - ahem - Pivotal role in this new initiative!
    </LI>  
    <LI> Spring Batch lead Michael Minella has <A href="http://www.springsource.org/node/9666"> announced that Spring Batch 2.2.0.RC1 is now available</a>.
    	The new release includes preliminary support for Spring Data, Java configuration support, non-identifying job parameters 
    	and numerous fixes and polishes. This release is amazing, and definitely worth a look. I, personally, <EM>love</EM> the Java configuration API that's
    	been surfaced. You don't need to write another…

This Week in Spring - April 2nd, 2013

Engineering | April 02, 2013 | ...

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring ! I've just returned from Devoxx UK and Devoxx France where I was very happy to talk to developers using Spring from all walks of industry. I also spoke at Skills Matter in London on building web applications using Spring. Thanks to Skills Matter, the London Spring User Group, and to the amazing Rob Harrop for having me, it was such a pleasure! The video from that session is available online if you're interested.

  1. Register today for the Super Early Bird rate at SpringOne 2GX 2013, in Santa Clara, CA Sept 9th-12th, 2013!
  2. Gary Russell's announced that Spring AMQP 1.2.0.M1 is now available.
  3. <LI> The Cujojs team has announced that <CODE>rest.js</CODE> is <a href="http://cujojs.com/">now part of Cujo.js</a>
    <a href…

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