One of the most interesting capabilities of Spring Cloud is its extensibility. You can extend it to support additional clouds, enhance already supported clouds, support new services, new service connectors--all without modifying the Spring Cloud code itself. In this blog, we explore this capability. If you haven’t done so already, please read the first and second blog in this series to acquire sufficient background.

The three axes of extensibility

Spring Cloud provides extensibility along three orthogonal directions. You may extend it in one of these directions and orthogonality ensures that…

In the last blog, I showed you how to use Spring Cloud's Java configuration option to obtain service connectors declaratively (there is also XML namespace support, if you need it). In this blog, we will take a closer look at how you would use Spring Cloud programmatically. This will help in the situations where you cannot use Java or XML configuration. It will also demystify how Spring Cloud works and prepare for the next blog in this series, where we discuss extending Spring Cloud.

To work with Spring Cloud we need to access an object of the Cloud class. However, you can’t create a Cloud object directly (its constructor is not public). Instead, you will obtain it through CloudFactory…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week saw the release of the amazing Spring XD 1.0.0.RELEASE. The release announcement is a good place to start your big-data journey. There, you'll find links to other great posts, learning content, etc. This is a great opportunity to evaluate what you hope to get out of your data, and whether you're getting it. Spring XD is your big-data Swiss-army knife: it can support live, streaming workloads; batch-centric offline workloads; and general data integration solutions. If you digest but one post from this week's roundup, let it be …

Recently Juergen Hoeller announced the availability of the first of two 4.1 release candidates. Brian Clozel followed up with a post on the static web resources handling enhancements. Previously Stephane Nicoll blogged about cache and JMS related improvements. The goal of this post is to summarize Spring MVC improvements.

The JDK 1.8 java.util.Optional is now supported for @RequestParam, @RequestHeader and @MatrixVariable controller method arguments while ListenableFuture is supported as a return value alternative to DeferredResult where an underlying service (or perhaps a call to AsyncRestTemplate) already returns…

Date: June 18, 2014

Location: Toronto, Canada

WARNING: Audio is not great, but hopefully tolerable :)

Spring Boot, the new convention-over-configuration centric framework from the Spring team at Pivotal, marries Spring's flexibility with conventional, common sense defaults to make application development not just fly, but pleasant! Join Spring developer advocate Josh Long@starbuxman for a look at what Spring Boot is, why it's turning heads, why you should consider it for your next application (REST,web, batch, big-data, integration, whatever!) and how to get started.

Learn more about Spring Boot at: http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot

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This week, Juergen announced the Spring Framework 4.1 release candidate. Now is the time to test those new features and see how they can make your applications better!

One of those new features is the flexible resolution and transformation of static web resources. Spring framework already allows you to serve static resources using ResourceHttpRequestHandlers. This feature gives you more power and new possibilities.

ResourceResolvers and ResourceTransformers

ResourceResolvers and ResourceTransformers are at the very core of this new feature.

ResourceResolvers can resolve resources, given their URL path. They can also resolve the externally facing public URL path for clients to use, given their internal resource path. ResourceTransformers…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week we're at OSCON in beautiful Portland, OR! It's been a crazy busy week, and only figures to be busier! It's been nice visiting with colleagues and community members alike. The booth on the expo floor has been flooded with users. I love this show. :)

1. First, the big news: the Spring framework 4.1 release candidate is now available! The new release features updated JSR-107 support, JMS 2.0 and annotation-centric JMS configuration, a SpEL compiler, and so much more.

• Spring XD co-lead Dr. Mark Pollack has just announced that Spring XD RC1 is now available. Installation is dead-simple. There are numerous new features, and this train's moving fast so check it out, download the bits, kick the tires, etc.
• Spring Data ninja Christoph Strobl put together a nice blog post introducing Spring Data MongoDB's full-text search
• The A Piece of My Code blog looks at how to use Spring's integration testing with mock services.
• Tousif Khan has put together a nice post on Spring's view controllers
• The Tech Zoo blog wrote up how to use Spring's Apache Tiles support
• The softwarecave blog introduces how to handle …

MongoDB officially has offered full text search capabilities since its 2.6 release. The feature ranks among the Top 5 most voted features for the server component and ships in its current version with numerous stemmers and parsers, phrase matching, negation and per field weights. So it's about time to give it a little love and share what's cooking in Spring Data's kitchen to support that feature.

For text indexing and searching MongoDB defaults the language to English, normalizing the text by tokenizing, removing common stop words and reducing words to their base. There's support for several…

Spring Data JPA allows manually defining the query to be executed by a repository method using the @Query annotation. Unfortunately parameter binding in JPQL is quite limited only allowing you to set a value and providing some type conversion. The latest Spring Data JPA M1 release of the Evans release train eases this pain by adding support for using SpEL expressions to use dynamically bound parameters within statements in @Query annotations which provides additional flexibility when defining queries manually. In this blog post, I am going to introduce you to the capabilities of this feature.