May's well underway and all the preparations for the S2G Forums in Amsterdam and London are complete. These S2G Forums are the premiere place for people in Europe to get access to the best information related to the Spring community (at a minimum cost!). I hope we'll see you in Amsterdam (May 26, 2011 - € 114 ) and / or London (May 31, 2011 - £ 99)!

In the interim, those of you that want an even better picture of how the Spring framework plays on the nascent CloudFoundry open-source cloud PaaS project should be sure to attend a webinar - Spring from Zero to Cloud in 60 minutes for both North America and Europe in just 10 short days!

1. SpringSource Tool Suite 2.6.1 Released. This release features the usual updates and features. Some particularly notable features: an updated bundled version of vFabric tc Server, version 2.5, improved support for tc Server instance creation and an update to the latest release of Spring Roo, version 1.1.3 and (yay!) bundled support for CloudFoundry. Check out the New and Noteworthy PDF document for the details.

	<li> The  <A HREF="http://blog.cloudfoundry.com/">CloudFoundry blog</a> has run two different parts with a detailed look at  what happens when you <code>push</code> applications to the CloudFoundry project. The first post details what happens from the <a href="http://blog.cloudfoundry.com/post/4737632136/what-happens-when-you-vmc-push-an-application-to-cloud">client-side perspective</a>. The second post provides details on what happens from <a href="http://blog.cloudfoundry.com/post/5223861703/how-cloud-foundry-works-when-a-new-application-is">the cloud-side perspective, once the application's been <code>push</code>-ed.</a> Check it out! All of this information, of course, can be gleamed by looking <a href="http://www.github.com/CloudFoundry">at the source</a>, but it's nice to have it laid out clearly. Makes reading the source easier, too! 
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<li>
<a href="http://www.springsource.org/spring-android/news/1.0.0.m3-released">Spring Android 1.0.0.M3 Released</a>: Spring Android supports usage of the Spring Framework in a Android environment. The 1.0.0.M3 release focuses on extending the use of Spring Social in native Android applications including support for Spring Social 1.0.0.M3 and updated RestTemplate (client) support for Spring 3.1.0.M1. Be sure to check out Roy Clarkson's blog posts on getting started: <a href="http://blog.springsource.com/2010/12/17/spring-android-and-maven-part-1/">Part 1</a> and <a href="http://blog.springsource.com/2011/02/09/spring-android-and-maven-part-2/">Part 2</a>. 
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<LI> 
	Want to learn even more about <a href="http://www.springsource.org/spring-android">Spring Android</a>? The project helps make it dead-simple to consume RESTful services from an Android client. <a href="http://www.android-peru.com/Connecting-RESTful-Web-Services-Android-Spring-Rest">Here's a cool talk about consuming RESTful web services using Spring Android's <code>RestTemplate</code></a> from the Android-Peru.com portal (the talk's in Spanish, although the code examples are universal!).    
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<li>
	<a href="http://www.tomcatexpert.com">TomcatExpert.com</a> keeps publishing more and more great content for those enterprise developers and admins interested in getting the most out of Tomcat. The latest post talks about <a href="http://www.tomcatexpert.com/blog/2011/05/09/cross-site-request-forgery">Cross-Site Request Forgery</a> and how new features in Tomcat 7 can protect against it. 
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  <LI> 
	Tobias Mattsson has just posted a blog on how to use 
	 <a href ="http://tobias-mattsson-magnolia.blogspot.com/2011/05/twitter-and-spring-social-in-magnolia.html">Spring Social to show recent Tweets in Magnolia CMS.</a> He also talks about a technology called <a href="http://documentation.magnolia-cms.com/modules/blossom.html">Blossom,</a> which lets you embed Spring MVC controllers in a Magnolia page. Lots of cool stuff in this post! 
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 <LI>
	MyNoSQL, a community blog about NoSQL technologies, has just put up a introspective look at the <a href="http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/5244372217/mongodb-adoption-in-the-java-world">adoption of MongoDB</a> in Java and also discusses other challenges in <em>big data</em>. My Conclusion:  Grails, Spring, Spring Data and CloudFoundry are leading the way!
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	<li>
  A blog, aptly named "Roo Findings", has just written a summary post about <a href="http://pragmatikroo.blogspot.com/2011/05/spring-roo-year-of-productivity.html">his year long odyssey</a> learning, using and <strong>loving</strong> Spring Roo. Lots of neat content in there, check it out!
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	<LI>This post - by Oxen Software Studio - illustrates two different approaches (one in Guice, one in Spring) to solving the following scenario: <a href="http://blog.oxen.com.ar/2011/05/scope-strategies-spring-and-guice.html">I've got a scoped bean, and I need to access it from a singleton.</a> The steps to get to the final answer are as revealing as the final answer itself, since I suspect a lot of people don't know that you can do this, let alone how easy Spring makes it.  
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