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…

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 yard…

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

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. 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 news…

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. 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. I contribute custom Project Templates in…

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…

Check out Spring on your favorite social network! 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 server. Additionally it features tighter integration with Equinox.

The first post introduces Spring 3.1 M1, generally. The second post introduces Spring 3.1's "profiles," which let you partition your beans along environment-specific lines with Environments. The third post introduces the Unified Property Management capabilities of the Environment abstraction.

A reminder: Juergen Hoeller - lead of the core Spring framework and contributor to all of the sister Spring projects, in some fashion or another - is giving two identical webinars - one for North America and one for Europe - on the new features in Spring 3.1 in two days (February 10th)! Be sure to register for this free webinar on the next iteration of the most widely used Java framework! This is turning out to be a record event, with incredible advance registration numbers. While there are no Spring 3.1 binaries (yet; stay tuned!), the code for the Spring project is always at your…