Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. We've got a lot of cool stuff happening and, as you might imagine, the entire team is abuzz in preparation for SpringOne2GX 2014, coming in just a few short weeks! If you haven't registered, now's the time to do so!

1. Spring Security lead and all-around sleepless ninja Rob Winch has just announced that Spring MVC Test HtmlUnit 1.0.0.M2 has been released. This is an awesome release if you're trying to unit test real pages with Spring MVC

• Spring Boot 1.1.5 has just been released. The new release mainly addresses a few issues and is a recommended upgrade for all users.
• I really enjoyed this blog, ¿Qué es Spring Framework?, which tries to explain what the fundamental value of Spring is. Largely, the (Spanish language) article explains that Spring handles the lifecycle for objects in a consistent way. It's easy to plug in various frameworks, software, around the edges when the fundamental life-cycle is handled. I would point out that this post uses Spring…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it.

1. Spring Cloud lead Ramnivas Laddad has written up a nice post that looks at how to extend Spring Cloud to consume other services in a consistent manner.

• I liked Samer Abdelkafi's blog introducing how to use Java configuration with Spring. It's always a good time to review..
• The Pragmatists blog has a detailed look at the sort of (tortured) steps involved in using Spring with the Play! web framework
• Biju Kunjummen put together a great post that looks at how to deploy a Spring Cloud enabled application to Cloud Foundry
• Thys Michels is back at it again, this time with a post on building a ToDo application with Spring MVC and Angular.js
• I am really happy that this link is in this week's roundup, the author -Priyadarshini - did an amazing job! Check out this really thoughtful introduction to using Spring Boot to build a CRUD-capable Spring Boot-based application…

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 …