Welcome back to another installment of "This Week in Spring." We've got a lot of content this week surrounding Spring Roo, and so, in that spirit, I move that we christen today Rooday, in honor of all the great Roo-related content in this week's roundup.

Things are kicking into over drive at SpringSource as everybody's preparing for SpringOne. This year's show is an exciting one because it'll be the first year where CloudFoundry will be present, which means that there will be lots of content around CloudFoundry and Spring, together, working as an unbeatable combination. I can't wait!

1. InfoQ did an interview with Spring Social lead Craig Walls on the just-released Spring Social 1.0. Fascinating read! Once the interview has whetted your appetite, be sure to try the Spring Social quickstart.

   Spring Social got some great coverage elsewhere, too, including this post from adtmag.com on the new 1.0 release.

 <LI> <a href = "http://www.springsource.org/node/3235">SpringSource Tool Suite 2.7.2 has been released.</a>  The new release features 
	 support for vFabric tc Server 2.6,
	support for Spring Roo 1.2.0.M1, and also updates  Mylyn to 3.6.2. Great stuff!
	
 </li>

<LI>
	<a href = "http://blog.springsource.com/2011/09/14/spring-roo-1-2-0-m1-released/">Spring Roo 1.2.M1 released. 	</a>
	The new release is a <EM>really</EM> exciting one.  There are some exciting <em>backoffice</em…

Welcome to another edition of "This Week in Spring" There's a lot to get to, so we'll get to it. A quick note: if you're at VMworld 2011 in sunny Las Vegas, come on over to the Cloud Application Platform booth and say hi.

1. What a week for CloudFoundry! The week saw the release and availability of Micro Cloud Foundry, the freely downloadable "PaaS-on-a-stick." Micro Cloud Foundry is 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.

   To learn more about the Micro Cloud Foundry, check out these three blog posts introducing Micro Cloud Foundry to Spring developers and Grails developers, and introducing the support for Micro CloudFoundry in SpringSource Tool Suite.

   	</li> 
   	
   	<LI>Thomas Risberg blogged today about <A HREF="http://blog.springsource.com/2011/08/30/using-postgres-on-cloud-foundry/">using PostgreSQL on Cloud Foundry</a>. The recently announced  PostgreSQL support   makes CloudFoundry the natural place to deploy your enterprise applications: between MySQL and PostgreSQL there's very likely few speed or feature…

Welcome to another edition of "This Week in Spring" Things are moving fast and furious as we near next week's VMworld 2011. I want to invite any attendees to visit your expert technologists at the VMWorld Spring booth. Let me know if you read this weekly roundup. Lots to talk about this week, so let's get to it!

<li>The preliminary session schedule has been published for <a href="http://www.springone2gx.com">SpringOne 2GX 2011</a>. This year's show is going to be another fantastic mix of deep technical content, cutting edge development and the absolute best place to learn about everything in the Spring universe. Be sure to <a href="http://springone2gx.com/conference/chicago/2011/10/register">register now</a>!</li>

<LI> <a href="http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.6.RELEASE/changelog.txt">Spring 3.0.6's was just released!</a>   		 
	 This release addresses over 50 minor issues and includes…

Today 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 supports Spring and Java, of course, but also provides runtime environments for Scala, Node.js, and Ruby so that you can release your inner polyglot programmer! Micro Cloud Foundry also provides many services like MongoDB, MySQL, and Redis with come ready to use immediately without having to do extensive installation and configuration. With built-in dynamic DNS support, developers can run their Micro Cloud Foundry wherever they happen to be working – whether at home, office or coffee shop – without any reconfiguration required. After creating and testing your application on Micro Cloud Foundry, you can easily deploy your…

Spring has rich support for transaction management through its PlatformTransactionManager interface and the hierarchy of implementations. Spring's transaction support provides a consistent interface for the transactional semantics of numerous APIs. Broadly, transactions can be split into two categories: local transactions and global transactions. Local transactions are those that affect only one transaction resource. Most often, these resources have their own transactional APIs, even if the notion of a transaction is not explicitly surfaced. Often it's surfaced as the concept of a session, a…

I looked at what a basic FactoryBean is in my previous post. While FactoryBeans are important - and knowing what they do can help you navigate the framework more effectively - they're by and large no longer the recommended approach to the task as of Spring 3.0 and the imminent Spring 3.1.

The whole point of a FactoryBean is to hide the construction of an object - either because it's very complex or because it can't simply be instantiated using the typical constructor-centric approach used by the Spring container (maybe it needs to be looked up? Maybe it needs a static registry method?) Spring has also supported the factory-method attribute in the XML format. The Java configuration approach offers a conceptually similar (in practice, the result is the same) alternative, but features a more concise, type-safe alternative.

Spring 3.0 saw the introduction of Java configuration which lets you define beans using Java. For instance, to register a regular javax.sql.DataSource with Spring in XML, you will more than likely delegate to a properties file for the sensitive configuration information (like a database password) and use Spring to instantiate the javax.sql.DataSource, like this:

<beans ...>
	<context:property-placeholder location = "ds.properties" />

	<bean id = "ds" class = "a.b.c.MySqlDataSource">
	  <property name = "user" value = "${ds.user}"/>
	  <property name = "password" value = "${ds.password}"/>
	</bean>
</beans>

This is a simple bean, and translates naturally into Java configuration. It would look like this:

 
import a.b.c.* ;
	
@Configuration 
@PropertySource("ds.properties") 
public class MyConfiguration { 
    @Inject private Environment env ; 
	
    @Bean public MySqlDataSource ds(){ 
        MySqlDataSource ds = new MySqlDataSource () ; 
        ds.setUser( env.getProperty("ds.user") );
        ds.setPassword( env.getProperty("ds.password…

In this post, I'll look at Spring's org.springframework.beans.factory.FactoryBean<T> interface. The definition of this interface is:

public interface FactoryBean<T> {
  T getObject() throws Exception;
  Class<T> getObjectType();
  boolean isSingleton();
}

A FactoryBean is a pattern to encapsulate interesting object construction logic in a class. It might be used, for example, to encode the construction of a complex object graph in a reusable way. Often this is used to construct complex objects that have many dependencies. It might also be used when the construction logic itself is highly volatile and depends on the configuration. A FactoryBean is also useful to help Spring construct objects that it couldn't easily construct itself. For example, in order to inject a reference to a bean that was obtained from JNDI, the reference must first be obtained. You can use the JndiFactoryBean to obtain this reference in a consistent way. You may inject the result of a FactoryBean's getObject() method into any other property.

Suppose you have a Person class whose definition is thus:

public class Person { 
 private Car car ;
 private void setCar(Car car){ this.car = car;  }	
}

and a FactoryBean whose definition is thus:

public class MyCarFactoryBean implements FactoryBean<Car>{
  private String make; 
  private int year ;

  public void setMake(String m){ this.make =m ; }

  public void setYear(int y){ this.year = y; }

  public Car getObject(){ 
    // wouldn't be a very useful FactoryBean 
    // if we could simply instantiate the object…

Welcome to another edition of "This Week in Spring." August is well underway and soon, at the end of August, VMworld 2011 will be upon us. Shortly thereafter, SpringOne will be here. It's going to get hot and heavy very quickly, so get ready! This week's "This Week in Spring" has a lot of interesting content from Gordon Dickens, of Chariot Solutions. Thanks Gordon for all the good reading!

1. Rod Johnson - Spring's founder and thought leader - did a keynote at TheServerSide earlier this year. This post relays some of the content of that keynote, including his thoughts on cloud computing, SOA, and more. Check it out.

<LI> 
	The video of the recent webinar, "<A href="http://www.springsource.org/node/3194">What's New in Apache Tomcat 7</a>," is now available on the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/SpringSourceDev">SpringSourceDev YouTube channel</a>.   
</LI> 
<LI>Luke Taylor has some great content on how to <a href="http://blog.springsource.com/2011/08/01/spring-security-configuration-with-scala/">configure Spring Security with the Scala DSL</a> he's been developing. Check it out! 
</LI> 
<LI> 
	<a href= "http://www.springsource.org/node/3192">Spring Data JDBC Extensions with Oracle Database Support</a>…

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week finds @springsource at OSCON (and OSCON Java and OSCON Data) in Portland, OR. If you're here, come visit our booth in the exhibition hall or check the schedule for any of the numerous Spring-talks!

If you missed us at OSCON, or if you're simply looking for an even better Spring experience, be sure to register for SpringOne 2GX 2011, the premier event for Spring, Grails and CloudFoundry developers. 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 hugely popular open source Spring technologies, Groovy & Grails, and Tomcat. 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.

1. OSCON's great, but I will be taking an hour to watch the webinar, Getting Started with Spring Data Redis for North America, and Europe.

   You should too: <a href="http://redis.io/">Redis</a> is an open source, advanced key-value store known for its excellent performance, its small footprint and embed-ability. <a href="http://www.springsource.org/spring-data/redis">The Spring Data</a> project makes it easier to build Spring-powered applications that use new data access technologies such as non-relational "NOSQL" databases and cloud based data services. Check it out!  </li>
   

2. <a href= "http://www.springsource.org/node/3189">Spring Data Graph 1.1.0.RC1 with Neo4j support Released</a>
   The key changes in the Spring Data Graph 1.1.…

Dear Spring Community,

I am pleased to announce the release Spring Integration, 2.0.5. This release addresses 48 issues of which roughly half were bugs and half were improvements. For details see:

Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog