Spring 3.1 M2 represents a marked improvement in core Spring, as well as Spring MVC! Rossen Stoyanchev chimes in to introduce the numerous (truly, you'll need to read the detailed blog to get an idea - I won't even bother trying to enumerate them all here!) new features in Spring MVC 3.1 M2, including XML-free web applications on Servlet 3.0 containers. Check it out!

Mark Fisher and Ramnivas Laddad's webinar Spring From Zero to Cloud in 60 Minutes is available online. This webinar is a breakneck-speed tour of some of the Spring, Spring Roo and Grails support on CloudFoundry. Check it out! Before you start watching, however, quickly signup at CloudFoundry.com to get access to the public, free-beta cloud service. If you want to checkout the code and learn more, check out CloudFoundry.org.

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! This was just put up today, and is now one of my favorite blogs introducing CloudFoundry; it's so ambitious, just like CloudFoundry itself! Recently, SpringSource put up a survey about dm Server and Virgo usage. The results of that survey are available here. If you're like me, and you've been using and advocating Spring and the Spring projects…

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

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…