Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week, there's a lot of Spring Tool Suite news, so be sure to check out

<A href="http://www.springsource.org/sts"> the new release</a> and try it out. 

One last reminder: be sure to join me Thursday for a <a href="http://www.springsource.org/node/4033">webinar introducing Spring's REST and mobile support</a> at 3:00PM GMT (for Europeans) and 10:00AM PST (for North America). 
 
If you've wanted to learn how to build mobile applications for your Spring-based backend services, then this talk is for you. We'll look
at Spring's rich support for REST,
Android and mobile platforms, in general. 

1. Jonathan Brisbin's announced that Spring Data REST 1.1.0.M1 has been released. The new release is basically a from-the-ground up rewrite. In the new release, there is support for all repositories including MongoDB and GemFire-based repositories.
2. Martin Lippert has announced that Spring Tool Suite and Groovy/Grails Tool Suite 3.2.0 have been released. The new version is much faster than the previous version, and includes updated support for Eclipse Juno SR2, high-res displays on OSX, and updated compliance with various Spring projects, including Spring Integration 2.2.
3. Rob Winch has announced that Spring Security SAML 1.0.0.RC2 has Been Released. Spring Security SAML is a third-party contribution that provides SAML support for Spring Security.
4. Spring Integration 2.2.2 is Now Available! The new release features various important bug fixes.
5. I'm presenting a webinar on March 14, 2013 - Multi Client Development with Spring! Join me to learn about REST, OAuth, Spring MVC, Spring Android, and much more!
6. Join Damien Dallimore and David Turanski on a webinar as they introduce the Webinar: Extending Spring Integration for Splunk - March 28th, 2013
7. New SpringOne2GX replays now available in HD on YouTube: Addressing Messaging Challenges Using Open Technologies, Introduction to Spring Integration and Spring Batch
8. @SpringSource is launching a (quick) swag-giveaway campaign!
9. Spring and Groovy/Grails Tool Suite lead Martin Lippert's put together a video comparing the speed of the Tool Suites at 3.1, versus their speed at 3.2.
10. Speaking of Spring Tool Suite, are you interested in saving 15% on SpringSource Tool Suite Training?
11. Yuan Ji has a nice post on how to persist Spring Social connections with Spring Data MongoDB. Awesome! I was about to roll up my sleeves and write such an implementation myself! But this should save me some work. Thanks, Yuan!
12. The Object Partners Inc. blog has a video up that introduces Spring Batch 2 and how to integrate it with Grails. That's pretty cool! They use a Groovy DSL instead of Spring Batch's native XML format to reduce verbosity. One new alternative is the Java configuration support in Spring Batch 2.2.
13. Petri Kainulainen has a blog post up that introduces Spring Data SOLR query methods.
14. The Ippon Technologies blog has a nice post on performance tuning the Spring Petclinic sample application.
15. Michael Simons has a nice post on using the popular, component-oriented web framework Vaadin with Spring

16.  Nicolas Frankel has a nice post 
     <a href="http://blog.frankel.ch/consider-replacing-spring-xml-configuration-with-javaconfig">on replacing Spring XML with Java Configuration</a>.
     
       
    

17. Tomasz Nurkiewicz is back, this time with a post on using the DeferredResult with Spring MVC 3.2's asynchronous request controllers.
18. Xavier Padró has put together a very nice post on the effect of registering various HttpMessageConverter instances on the RestTemplate when handling different types of RESTful resources.
19. Before the RestTemplate and REST, and before document-oriented SOAP-based web services and Spring Web Services, there was Spring's JaxWsPortProxyFactoryBean, which can give you a strongly typed client to talk to SOAP web service with a JAX-WS port, or client.

     This post introduces how <A href="http://www.tweetsofjava.com/?p=133">to use Spring's JAX-WS support to create a client</a>.
    

20. The Spring Addon blog has a perhaps overly-brief look at how to setup a Spring MVC-based REST endpoint. He makes a good point though: if you've got a Spring MVC application, then exposing a RESTful service is dead simple from there.

21. The Kamal's blog has a nice post on how to setup a Spring MVC 3.0-based application. NB that, with more recent releases of Spring, you don't need any XML for web.xml or the Spring application context.

22. The fuzzydb in focus has a nice post on how to support both existing Hibernate-based services, as well as JPA-based repositories based on Spring Data JPA, which requires a EntityManager reference. The approach is simple, and something that's uniquely easy to do with Spring's Java configuration style.