Welcome back to another exciting roundup! This week's been a blur. Honestly. So much new stuff happening, all after the rush of excitement that was the S2G Forums in Europe last week. Leave's a guy breathless, but excited. Read on!

1. 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.

2. Jeremy Grelle, Spring BlazeDS lead and general "Spring web dude," has announced the first release candidate of the Spring Flex project. The Spring Flex project integrates the Flex BlazeDS middleware with Spring, providing a dead-simple way to expose Spring beans in a way that can be consumed by Flex or Adobe AIR web and desktop clients. The Spring Flex project also provides integration with Spring Security and provides tight-knit support for server-side push based messaging, entirely in-BlazeDS, or through JMS or Spring Integration. Ever wanted to notify users logged into an application that something's happened on the server side (Twitter message, new AMQP message, new XMPP message, whatever..)? Spring Flex makes it easy.
3. Martin Lippert, SpringSource Tool Suite team lead, has given an interview about the latest and greatest in SpringSource Tool Suite 2.6. He talks about many of the highlights, including STS 2.6's reworked Spring Webflow visualization, Java configuration support, the cloud, agent-based reloading, and what's next. Check it out!
4. Thomas Risberg has announced the Spring Data Document support for MongoDB, release 1.0.0.M3. The changes and new features in Spring Data Document 1.0.0.M3 includes much improved mapping and conversion support. The MappingMongoConverter is now the default converter used by the MongoTemplate and the SimpleMongoConverter has been deprecated and will be removed. The concept of a default collection name has also been removed and all operations of the MongoTemplate are based on the collection name used for the entity class that is the target of the operation. The collection name used for an entity class defaults to the classname starting with a lower-case letter but it can be customized using the @Document annotation. See the changelog for more details.
5. Milestone 5 of Virgo 3.0.0 is available for download. This is an important milestone which adds significant functional enhancements, upgrades several dependencies to their latest levels including Spring 3.0.5, Tomcat 7.0.12, and Servlet 3.0, and fixes a number of bugs. Full details are available in the release notes. The Virgo Web Server from EclipseRT is a completely module-based Java application server that is designed to run enterprise Java applications and Spring-powered applications with a high degree of flexibility and reliability. It offers a simple yet comprehensive platform to develop, deploy, and service enterprise Java applications.
6. Marius Bogoevici - a Spring Integration committer - has written a fantastic post on the options for using a JPA EntityManager in JBoss AS with Spring. The main thrust of the post is that the application server automatically creates an EntityManager, by default, so there may be no need to recreate one in Spring - you can simply inject the existing reference. This approach is specifically to get around the presumptuous behavior of a full blown application server. If you'd like to run in Tomcat, then Spring's the easiest way to configure a JPA EntityManager. Marius also explains how to let Spring run the show entirely by disabling the application server behavior. This has the plural benefits of usually being more performant, and of keeping configuration with the application itself, not the server.
7. Matt Raible has posted a follow up to his blog posts and screencasts on security in web applications. Previously, he demonstrated how to use Spring Security, Apache Shiro, and Java EE security in a pseudo identical fashion to secure a web application, highlighting the differences as appropriate. This follow up article talks about all three technologies and provides a comparison for enabling programmatic login when integrated in a Spring MVC application. The Spring Security support has been around for a long time and works in numerous containers (not Just Java EE 6 compliant containers) with no fuss. Nice!
8. Have you dabbled in other JVM based languages? Have you taken a look at Scala? Well at the recent Scala Days conference in Palo Alto, CA, the Cloud Foundry team announced new Scala support on CloudFoundry.com!
9. If you were at the S2G Forums in London last week, you would've received a free copy of the Open Source Journal - a printed (and freely downloadable .PDF) magazine. This publication has done a bang up job covering some of the Spring framework technologies. It's available from the publisher's web site as a free download. Check out the first and second issues here. The second issue, for example, has a great introduction to Spring.NET (including the new code configuration - the .NET analog to Spring Java's Java configuration), a look at Spring.NET's RestTemplate (a nice analog to Spring Java's RestTemplate), and a look at using Spring Integration (and Spring Web Services) to make short work of exposing web services. This format is especially ideal if you have a .PDF-capable e-reader or tablet PC. Check it out!