It's May, already! Seems like just yesterday we were toasting the arrival of the new year...

As they say, time flies when you're having fun! This year's been a roller coaster - exciting news and events every day - too much to keep up with, certainly!

1. Jon Brisbin has written up an epic post introducing the CloudFoundry project and many of the technologies that you can use on it.

   This was just put up today, and is now one of my favorite blogs introducing CloudFoundry; it's so ambitious, just like CloudFoundry itself!

2. Another masterpiece of a sample is the blog that Costin Leau wrote, Getting Started with Redis and Spring Cloud Foundry. This post is well worth reading whether you're doing CloudFoundry, Spring Data, or both. A dynamic duo, indeed!

<li>European community members can learn more about Spring, Spring Data and Cloud Foundry at the S2G Forum Series: <a href="http://www.springsource.com/events/s2gforum-5-26-2011-amsterdam">Amsterdam…

Another week, another great allotment of new content that - as usual - draws from the community and from SpringSource. The enthusiasm for CloudFoundry continues unabated this week, with some interesting content in this week's roundup. For more content on CloudFoundry, you might consult the CloudFoundry.com and CloudFoundry.org sites. In particular, the slides from the Cloud user group held the day after the announcement are available here.

1. Oliver Gierke has posted a blog on Advanced Spring Data JPA which explains how to use the features in the Spring Data JPA project that elevate the art of JPA programming, like the integration of the QueryDSL library. This post - and the library - speak to the ongoing, first-class support in the Spring frameworks for all data access technologies, be they RDBMS, NoSQL, or anything else.
2. Peter Ledbrook, Grails Developer Advocate, has recently expanded on his original blog on using Grails and CloudFoundry.

   This blog provides a detailed look at using Grails' GORM support with the various data stores available on CloudFoundry. Check it out!

3. Alex Popescu's MyNoSQL portal, MyNoSQL, has some interesting comments about the NoSQL options supported in CloudFoundry. He comments that "From a storage perspective, Cloud Foundry is encouraging polyglot persistence right from the start offering access to a relational database (MySQL), a super-fast smart key-value store (Redis), and a popular document database (MongoDB)."
   This post - and indeed the entire site - is a very valuable resource for CloudFoundry users that want to exploit the NoSQL options, but don't understand the use cases yet. There's a lot of good content on both MongoDB and Redis, for example.
4. Mark Thomas, Apache Tomcat 7 release manager and engineer, has written up a post on Apache Tomcat 7's session fixation protection security feature on the TomcatExpert.com website. Keeping on top of the latest Tomcat security features is important if you are, like the majority of developers, using Tomcat (or hardened, ops-friendly derivatives like SpringSource's tcServer) as a production server for your Java (and often Spring) applications. Additionally, Tomcat's bundled with several application servers. Either way, knowing about Tomcat's industry-leading features can only help.
5. Costin Leau has announced the Spring GemFire 1.0.1 release, which incorporates bug fixes and promotes stability.

<li>Just a reminder to our European community members, the S2G Forum Series will be held in <a href="http://www.springsource.com/events/s2gforum-5-26-2011-amsterdam">Amsterdam (May 26th)</a> and <a href="http://www.springsource.com/events/s2gforum-5-31-2011-london">London (May 31st)</a>. There will be tons of great sessions about Spring, Groovy and Grails as well as talks focused specifically on CloudFoundry, Tomcat and Gemfire so be sure to <a href…

Welcome back to This Week in Spring. The enthusiasm for last week's Cloud Foundry announcement was outstanding and appears to be getting stronger! People all over the world have flooded the SpringSource and CloudFoundry forums, downloads pages and source repositories. What unprecedented activity!

Many of the different, powerful technologies coming out of SpringSource recently have been leading up to the Cloud Foundry release so I invite you to review some of the exciting stuff that's come out in the last few months that have become even more interesting in terms of the cloud and Cloud Foundry: Spring Gemfire, Spring AMQP, Spring 3.1 profiles, Spring 3.1 caching abstraction, Spring Data, Spring Integration support for NoSQL, and Spring Hadoop, vFabric Hyperic, vFabric RabbitMQ, and vFabric GemFire. Of course, for all of these technologies - the first, and best, tooling and development experience continues to be SpringSource Tool Suite and Spring Roo.

Ok, onward to this week's review. So much exciting stuff, so little time!

1. Christian Dupuis has just written up a detailed blog on using STS to deploy to Cloud Foundry.

 <li><A href="http://www.springsource.org/node/3103">Spring Roo 1.1.3</a>, featuring 
 Cloud Foundry support, shell enhancements, and improved support for composite primary keys - among other things - has been released. 
</li>

	 <li> DZone has published a <a href="http://refcardz.dzone.com/refcardz/spring-roo-open-source-rapid?oid=hom38521">Spring Roo RefCard</a> by the Spring Roo team's <a href="http://www.twitter.com/schmidtstefan">Stefan Schmidt.</a> This RefCard's a fantastic way to get going quickly with Spring Roo. Spring Roo, it could be argued, is ideally suited to the RefCard…

This year is moving along at a very quick clip!

We've already seen a torrent of new and exciting releases for Spring users and just today news of perhaps the most exciting thing yet went out. If you didn't get it because you aren't, for example, a registered SpringSource Tool Suite user, then here are the salient bits:

Next Tuesday - April 12th - VMware is hosting a webinar - "Spring into the cloud!" - with the provocative explanation, "Spring has already simplified enterprise Java development. Next up is cloud development."

The webinar will be presented for both Europe and North America timezones. See this page for details, and don't…

Well, that was a good week! Lots of good stuff coming out of both the community and of course out of SpringSource itself.

This week reminded I was reminded that the Spring framework usually has something that could go a long way in simplifying or alleviating a challenge at hand if you just know where to look. Often, I'll check the SpringSource Forums, the JIRA instance, and - if I'm sufficiently convinced it's not already resolved or accounted for in the forums or in JIRA - in the StackOverflow category for Spring. SpringSource engineers try to monitor both the forums and - less ocassionally - the StackOverflow forums, as well. Additionally, I like to learn as I go - it's a "cinch by the inch, hard by the…

Another great week - lots of new (and novel!) types of content and indeed, new sources of new content, too! Enjoy!

1. SpringSource unveiled the new SpringSource YouTube channel. This channel features exciting technical content on the SpringSource technologies, and should be your first destination for new content and for content that you might've missed the first time around. Check it out today! Personally, I find that this channel is fantastic on a big screen TV that supports a browser or YouTube (Google TV/Apple TV/slingbox/etc.) or on a peripheral screen - like a second laptop or second monitor. You can also listen to it on a portable device like an iPhone in the car, on the commute.
2. ...Speaking of the YouTube channel, the content and slides of last week's webinar - Getting Started with Spring and STS - is available for those that missed it. Juergen Hoeller, lead of the Spring framework, introduced the exciting next generation (3.1) of the Spring framework a few weeks ago in a live webinar, which is also available on the SpringSource YouTube channel!
3. Martin Lippert has announced the latest release of the SpringSource Tool Suite, version 2.6.0. The new release is packed with new features, and tracks the latest versions of various projects (Spring Roo 1.1..2, Eclipse Helios SR2, Groovy 1.7.8, Grails 1.3.7). It included updated support and performance for both Spring Roo and Groovy on Grails, a graphical editor for Spring Web Flow, and new support for content assist, quick fixes and refactorings for Spring annotations (@Autowired, @Qualifier, @RequestMapping, etc.).

4. Ramnivas Laddad pointed This Week in Spring to this very innovative Chrome browser plugin. To use it, type "spring" in the omnibox bar (the search/address bar) followed by a space, and then the nane of the class that you are searching for. It'll automatically bring up candidate results linked to the documentation! Fantastic, and handy! (NB: we tested this with the just-released Chrome 10, though it no doubt works with at least Chrome 9.)

5. InfoQ has the video of Mark Pollack's and Chris Richardson's amazing introduction to Spring Data from the SpringOne2GX event last year in Chicago. Spring Data is a great way to take advantage of these new, powerful datastore options (sometimes called "NoSQL" stores) in a way that's familiar, and idiomatic for Spring users. Check it out!
6. The latest release of the Spring Data project featuring support for Neo4j has been released. The new version includes many new features and tracks the latest version of Neo4j, itself. Neo4j is one of the many new specialized datastores available to developers today. Neo4j models data as relationships and nodes. It's optimized for fast node traversal, as in a Facebook friend-graph, for example.
   Additionally, SpringSource is producing a webinar on Spring Data (and specifically, the Spring Data Graph subprojct encompassing the Neo4j support) on April 20th. The presentation will be presented for both North America and for Europe. Register now!
7. The Spring framework helps you build the best applications. Spring Social builds on that promise and lets you integrate your application with your users. The JTeam group is at it again, this time with an interesting updated look at Spring Social complete with source code and a sample application. Check it out!
8. Spring MVC provides support for many different types of views, including RESTful payloads, Velocity templates, JSPs, and Tiles-based views. This blog post explains how to integrate Spring MVC with Tiles
9. Ken Rimple from Chariot Solutions has recorded a screencast on the newest member of the SpringSource family, Wavemaker.
10. More people are using the Spring framework now than ever before, and a consequence of that that growth is newer, specialized support for Spring in various tools. One UML toolmaker - Architexa - talks about their enhanced support for the Spring framework in their Eclipse-based product. Check out this blog for more.
11. Ashish Jain provides an interesting perspective on Spring 3.1's new caching support.

    Ashish's chosen to simplify his software stack (by removing Hibernate, and instead using straight JDBC through the Spring framework's JdbcTemplate, a…

This week has seen yet another flurry of exciting new releases and updates, great community content and the exciting announcement welcoming WaveMaker to the SpringSource family.

1. Rod Johnson announced the acquisition of WaveMaker today in the SpringSource blog. WaveMaker is a widely used graphical tool that enables non-expert developers to build web applications quickly. From the post: "While WaveMaker is already part of the Spring ecosystem, it will now become an integral part of the Spring family and VMware's cloud strategy. All of WaveMaker's staff will be joining VMware." Exciting…

This week has seen yet another flurry of exciting new releases and updates and great community content.

Hold on to your hats!

Let's get right to it.

1. Spring Roo 1.1.2 has been released. This new release contains over 200 enhancements, new features and fixes since the 1.1.1 release last month. Some of the highlights include enhanced tool usability, persistence enhancements, GWT and Spring MVC enhancements, and library upgrades.

2. Martin Lippet has just announced the 2.5.2.SR1 and 2.6.0.M2 releases of SpringSource Tool Suite.

   The 2.5.2.SR1 "refresh" has updated support for Groovy 1.7.8, Grails 1.3.7, an update to Eclipse Helios SR2 (3.2.6), and the just-released Spring Roo 1.1.2. The 2.6.0.M2 mileston also includes a Roo plugin manager, improved support for @RequestMapping, and tons of improvements to the Groovy and Grails tooling.

3. Martin Lippet has also put together information on the oft-asked and newly answered question: how do

   I contribute custom Project…

Applications don't exist in a vacuum. They need to communicate with their customers and with other applications. Application Integration is all about enabling this communication. Integration lets applications share services and data with each other, and, just as often, integration helps applications connect with their users.

Spring Integration provides a framework to build integration solutions, to facilitate these kinds of solutions. Spring Integration solutions describe the flow of data through a pipeline. Data enters the processing pipeline as a message. The message is moved forward through…

What a week! Lots of good, foundational content available this week from, and for, the community. Let's get right to it.

 <li> <a href="http://blog.springsource.com/2011/02/21/spring-3-1-m1-mvc-namespace-enhancements-and-configuration/">Rossen Stoyanchev</a> continues the whirlwind introduction to the new features in Spring 3.1, this time with a look at the MVC namespace and @Configuration-based improvements. </li>

1. Chris Beams blogged about the upcoming FeatureSpecification support in Spring 3.1 Feature Specifications provide the same features as the XML namespace infrastructure elements, like <tx:annotation-driven>, in a Java configuration-centric way. This is a very powerful feature, and this blog post is the best way to get started.
2. SpringSource Tool Suite lead Christian Dupuis - tweets that users can now download STS without submitting to the registration form. Very cool!

<li> Can't get enough Spring? 

Check out Spring on your favorite social network!

3. Glyn Normington has just announced the Eclipse Virgo 3.0.0.M01 release is now available for download. The new version features tighter integration with the Eclipse stack, including the Eclipse Virgo Jetty…