I am pleased to announce the first and final release candidate of the Babbage episode of the Spring Data release train. I consists of the following modules:

• Spring Data Commons 1.6 RC1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data JPA 1.4 RC1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data MongoDB 1.3 RC1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Neo4j 2.3 RC1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog

The release forms a significant milestone towards the GA releases expected around SpringOne this year. We added support for the MongoDB Aggregation Framework and improved the execution of polymorphic queries. On the JPA side of things we introduced support to use SpEL expressions in manually defined queries, improved the handling of entities using @IdClass and now allow to define the Date binding for repository query parameters using @TemporalType. The Neo4j module added support for countBy(…) queries and type safe query execution for repositories. You can find a more detailed list of features at the wiki page summarizing the Babbage content.

This release is the perfect time to play with the new features and report back your experiences before we turn it to a GA release in a few weeks. We'd be happy to hear your opinions in the forums or in the bug tracker in case you run into any issues.

If you want to learn more about Spring Data or the Spring eco-system in general, the upcoming SpringOne conference in Santa Clara, CA is the perfect time and place to be. Checkout the schedule and register!