Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Krakow, Poland for Geecon, the Polish developer conference where, of course, I'll be speaking to developers about Spring. (and, maybe, Spring). If you're around, find me, I'll be wearing the giant Spring leaf t-shirt! :)

Other than that, there's a lot to get through so let's get to it!

• In preparation for the upcoming Spring IO Platform, Spring Data release train Dijkstra has been released! This is a tremendous release train that includes: JPA, MongoDB, Neo4J, Apache Solr, Couchbase, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Gemfire, Redis and Data REST! Congrats to the Spring Data Team!
• Spring Boot 1.1.0 M1 is now available and introduces MongoDB and Gemfire support, as well as improved actuator metrics and health endpoints.
• Final maintenance releases for the Spring Framework 3.2.x and 4.0.x versions are now available!
• Spring Integration ninja (rockstar!) Artem Bilan put together a nice post introducing all the amazing Java configuration support in the nascent Spring Integration Java configuration DSL, which builds upon the basic @EnableIntegration support available in the just-released Spring Integration 4.0. You should read that post. Seriously. I want to steal some of Artem's thunder by excerpting this one amazing code-snippet:

  java @Bean IntegrationFlow helloWorldFlow() { return IntegrationFlows.from("helloWorldInput") .filter("World"::equals) .transform("Hello "::concat) .handle(System.out::println) .get(); } Yep! That's a Spring Integration flow that handles input messages, filters them, transforms them, and then gives them to the escape-hatch method, handle, which lets the developer insert any behavior into the mix. Remember, you can change anything about this - including where it gets the messages from and where it writes the messages to. Indeed, the output of one flow could be the input to another. Congratulations, Spring Integration team! Also, make sure to check out the launch webinar replay!

• I know I mentioned this last week, but it's so worth a re-read! Groovy 2.3.0 is here! (Hah! Gotcha! This week's link was to a different post by the same author on the subject of the Groovy 2.3.0 release! But aren't you glad you read it, anyway?) Go, Groovy, go!
• My pal Pieter Humphrey has done a nice introductory screencast on Spring XD - showing how to get up and running doing stream processing, and wiring it to an analytics dashboard in less than 7 minutes. XD uses a deceptively simple DSL (domain specific language) and no Java code - it's never been easier to work with Hadoop.
• Spring Security lead Rob Winch has been moving heaven and earth to make unit-testing secure applications easier than ever. In this first installment of a new series, Rob looks at new annotations designed to stand in place of a live-fire Spring Security apparatus to mock a Principal, a UserDetailsService, and more. Check it out and stay tuned for more!
• Speaking of Rob Winch, he gave an epic introduction to Spring Security at SpringOne2GX 2013 last year. This is a perfect place to jump onboard if you're new to Spring Security.
• New Relic's Ashley Puls was kind enough to do a webinar with your humble author on Web Application Diagnostics using New Relic. Thanks, Ashley! I'll be very honest, this webinar was super informative for me. I knew just a little about New Relic, and in working through the development of the webinar I learned about a zillion and five use cases that are well served by New Relic. Really cool stuff!
• Also published this week - a SpringOne2GX 2013 Replay by Emad Benjamin and Guillermo Tantucho: Virtualizing and Tuning Large Scale Java Platforms. This goes over JVM memory tuning and all the tricks and tips for getting Java to run well on a virtualized environment.
• SpringOne2GX 2013 replay - a great talk from SAS Software: Migrating from WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss to Pivotal tcServer. This might go well with a recent post on why App Servers are dead by Eberhard Wolff.
• Do you love Spring's new home on the web, spring.io, as much as I do? Want to learn more? Check out this talk by project lead and Spring ninja Chris Beams on the makeup of the site, its development, and deployment.
• Last week, Spring Data Neo4j lead and graph-ninja Michael Hunger and I gave a talk on Spring Boot and Neo4j. This talk was fun for me because it gave me a lot of excuses to play with Neo4j. In point of fact, Michael and I are doing a webinar on about the same subject on the 20th of May (that's 7 days away!), so come see what we've come up with. In the meantime, you may want to check out this recent post on creating a time-tree with Cypher, the language that Michael works on that's used to drive interactions with Neo4j. That post was, of course, a response to another post that Michael put together on importing forests into Neo4j, also worth a read!
• I quite liked this post introducing how to setup a Spring Batch job using Spring Boot. The author found a comfortable configuration-middle ground in the Groovy BeanBuilder support, and describes it nicely in this post
• Moritz Schulze has put together a very nice post, following others in the series, on how to integration test REST services
• Are you using Spring Boot and want to use Spock? Netflix engineer Tomas Lin has put together an example on his GitHug page. Check it out!
• Jakub Kubrynski has put together a nice post on how to use Spring Boot's org.springframework.boot.actuate.system.ApplicationPidListener (which Jakub contributed - thanks Jakub!) - to work with the application's process identifier (PID). Nice!
• Meltdown 1.0.0 has been released! Meltdown is a Clojure interface to the Reactor project. So... functional programming and stream processing inside a lisp-like language? A dream! Check it out!

I'm pleased to announce the release of Spring LDAP 2.0.2.RELEASE. The highlights of this release include:

• LDAP-300 - Fix potential NullPointerException when using Spring LDAP in a uber jar
• LDAP-299 - Deprecation of spring-ldap-ldif-batch module in favor of using classes within Spring Batch

For additional information on the release, refer to the changelog.

Reference | Javadoc

Speaker: Pieter Humphrey

Creating a stream of live twitter data for an analytics dashboard using Spring XD, a JavaScript D3 component / Spring XD's REST API.

Source code:https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-xd-samples/tree/master/analytics-dashboard

Learn more about Spring XD: http://projects.spring.io/spring-xd

Learn more about Spring for Apache Hadoop: http://projects.spring.io/spring-hadoop

!{iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/nOfzrQ6CdKI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen}{/iframe}

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Krakow, Poland for Geecon, the Polish developer conference where, of course, I'll be speaking to developers about Spring. (and, maybe, Spring). If you're around, find me, I'll be wearing the giant Spring leaf t-shirt! :)

Other than that, there's a lot to get through so let's get to it!

• In preparation for the upcoming Spring IO Platform, Spring Data release train Dijkstra has been released! This is a tremendous release train that includes: JPA, MongoDB, Neo4J, Apache Solr, Couchbase, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Gemfire, Redis and Data REST! Congrats to the Spring Data Team!
• Spring Boot 1.1.0 M1 is now available and introduces MongoDB and Gemfire support, as well as improved actuator metrics and health endpoints.
• Final maintenance releases for the Spring Framework 3.2.x and 4.0.x versions are now available!
• Spring Integration ninja (rockstar!) Artem Bilan put together a nice post introducing all the amazing Java configuration support in the nascent Spring Integration Java configuration DSL, which builds upon the basic @EnableIntegration support available in the just-released Spring Integration 4.0. You should read that post. Seriously. I want to steal some of Artem's thunder by excerpting this one amazing code-snippet:

  java @Bean IntegrationFlow helloWorldFlow() { return IntegrationFlows.from("helloWorldInput") .filter("World"::equals) .transform("Hello "::concat) .handle(System.out::println) .get(); } Yep! That's a Spring Integration flow that handles input messages, filters them, transforms them, and then gives them to the escape-hatch method, handle, which lets the developer insert any behavior into the mix. Remember, you can change anything about this - including where it gets the messages from and where it writes the messages to. Indeed, the output of one flow could be the input to another. Congratulations, Spring Integration team! Also, make sure to check out the launch webinar replay!

• I know I mentioned this last week, but it's so worth a re-read! Groovy 2.3.0 is here! (Hah! Gotcha! This week's link was to a different post by the same author on the subject of the Groovy 2.3.0 release! But aren't you glad you read it, anyway?) Go, Groovy, go!
• My pal Pieter Humphrey has done a nice introductory screencast on Spring XD - showing how to get up and running doing stream processing, and wiring it to an analytics dashboard in less than 7 minutes. XD uses a deceptively simple DSL (domain specific language) and no Java code - it's never been easier to work with Hadoop.
• Spring Security lead Rob Winch has been moving heaven and earth to make unit-testing secure applications easier than ever. In this first installment of a new series, Rob looks at new annotations designed to stand in place of a live-fire Spring Security apparatus to mock a Principal, a UserDetailsService, and more. Check it out and stay tuned for more!
• Speaking of Rob Winch, he gave an epic introduction to Spring Security at SpringOne2GX 2013 last year. This is a perfect place to jump onboard if you're new to Spring Security.
• New Relic's Ashley Puls was kind enough to do a webinar with your humble author on Web Application Diagnostics using New Relic. Thanks, Ashley! I'll be very honest, this webinar was super informative for me. I knew just a little about New Relic, and in working through the development of the webinar I learned about a zillion and five use cases that are well served by New Relic. Really cool stuff!
• Also published this week - a SpringOne2GX 2013 Replay by Emad Benjamin and Guillermo Tantucho: Virtualizing and Tuning Large Scale Java Platforms. This goes over JVM memory tuning and all the tricks and tips for getting Java to run well on a virtualized environment.
• SpringOne2GX 2013 replay - a great talk from SAS Software: Migrating from WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss to Pivotal tcServer. This might go well with a recent post on why App Servers are dead by Eberhard Wolff.
• Do you love Spring's new home on the web, spring.io, as much as I do? Want to learn more? Check out this talk by project lead and Spring ninja Chris Beams on the makeup of the site, its development, and deployment.
• Last week, Spring Data Neo4j lead and graph-ninja Michael Hunger and I gave a talk on Spring Boot and Neo4j. This talk was fun for me because it gave me a lot of excuses to play with Neo4j. In point of fact, Michael and I are doing a webinar on about the same subject on the 20th of May (that's 7 days away!), so come see what we've come up with. In the meantime, you may want to check out this recent post on creating a time-tree with Cypher, the language that Michael works on that's used to drive interactions with Neo4j. That post was, of course, a response to another post that Michael put together on importing forests into Neo4j, also worth a read!
• I quite liked this post introducing how to setup a Spring Batch job using Spring Boot. The author found a comfortable configuration-middle ground in the Groovy BeanBuilder support, and describes it nicely in this post
• Moritz Schulze has put together a very nice post, following others in the series, on how to integration test REST services
• Are you using Spring Boot and want to use Spock? Netflix engineer Tomas Lin has put together an example on his GitHug page. Check it out!
• Jakub Kubrynski has put together a nice post on how to use Spring Boot's org.springframework.boot.actuate.system.ApplicationPidListener (which Jakub contributed - thanks Jakub!) - to work with the application's process identifier (PID). Nice!
• Meltdown 1.0.0 has been released! Meltdown is a Clojure interface to the Reactor project. So... functional programming and stream processing inside a lisp-like language? A dream! Check it out!

[callout title=Updated March 31 2015]This blog is outdated and no longer maintained. Please refer to the Test Section of the reference documentation for updated documentation. [/callout]

On Monday I announced the release of Spring Security 4.0.0.M1. This is the first of a three part blog series introducing the Spring Security Testing support. The series outline can be seen below:

• In this post we will discuss how spring-security-test makes method based security testing easier
• Our second post will demonstrate how to use spring-security-test with Spring MVC Test
• Our final post will demonstrate how to use spring-security-test with Spring Test MVC HtmlUnit
…

Dear Spring Community,

we are happy to announce a minor maintenance release of our Eclipse-based tooling today: The Spring Tool Suite (STS) 3.5.1 and the Groovy/Grails Tool Suite (GGTS) 3.5.1.

This maintenance release includes a number of bug fixes as well as a few updates, including:

• added Java8 support for faceted web projects
• updated Maven Integration for Eclipse to support Java8
• m2e-egit connector now included by default
• Grails updated to 2.3.8
• the Groovy 2.3 compiler now availabe from the dashboard (including early support for Grails 2.4M2 in GGTS)

Both tool suites ship on top of the latest Eclipse Kepler SR2 release.

To download the distributions, please go visit:

• Spring Tool Suite: https://spring.io/tools/sts/all
• Groovy/Grails Tool Suite: https://spring.io/tools/ggts/all

Detailed new and noteworthy notes can be found here: STS/GGTS 3.5.1 New & Noteworthy.

The next version 3.6.0 is scheduled to arrive in July 2014, shortly after the Eclipse Luna (4.4) release. The first milestone build is scheduled to arrive in late May 2014.

Enjoy!

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Los Angeles, speaking to large companies who are looking at building their next-generation architectures on top of Spring and Spring Boot, in particular. Oh, I also go to visit the super cool Pivotal Los Angeles office!

• Spring Data Hadoop ninja Thomas Risberg (who, by the way, was one of the original authors on JdbcTemplate, among his many other claims to fame!) has just announced Spring for Hadoop 2.0.RC3. The new release grows the set of supported Hadoop distributions and includes support for YARN, which you can see in action in some of our Getting Started Guides.
• Spring Integration 4.0 is a major upgrade - the new 4.0 release offers full support for Annotations and Java Configuration + some Spring Boot support! With 4.0, you'll be able to make XML - free integration applications. Join project lead Gary Russell taking you through all the new hotness in the webinar, Spring Integration 4.0, the new frontier, on May 13.
• Spring Framework 4.0.4 is a maintenance release with some minor dependency updates, and is recommended. Update the version and mvn clean install/gradle package now!
• The new Spring Data release, Spring Data Dijkstra RC1 (named for Edsger W. Dijkstra), is finally here, and packed full of awesome features! One of my personal favorites is the ability to return Java 8 Optional values in a repository. I put together an example here. The new release train is huge, and includes a few (historically exclusively community-driven) modules like Spring Data Cassandra, Spring Data Solr, and Spring Data Couchbase. Don't miss it!
• The new 3.5.1 release of the Spring and Groovy/Grails Tool Suites are now available. The new releases are packed with new features, updates and a new baseline so check out the release notes.
• Groovy 2.3 is here! (just go read and download, now!)
• The amazing, and sleepless (I'm sure of it! Just look at the blogs he's released!), Rob Winch just announced the first milestone of Spring Security 4.0.0 featuring testing support.
• Spring HATEOAS 0.11 is now available, and features an API for client-side service traversal called Traverson.
• Spring Data Neo4j lead Michael Hunger and I will be giving a webinar on the new awesome in Spring Data Neo4j 3.0 and Neo4j 2.0 on May 20th.
• Not skipping a beat, Xavier Padró has put together a very nice post on using Spring Integration's Java API.
• Spring framework ninja Stéphane Nicoll has just put up a nice blog post introducing the annotation-driven JMS support in the upcoming Spring framework 4.1.
• Want to learn more about Neo4j and Spring Data Neo4J? There's a nice little tutorial on JavaBeat about Spring Data Neo4j. The English is a little choppy and the code examples are garbled with noise, but I think you should still be able to get the gist of it. If you want a more contemporary, Java-centric alternative, check out these guides on using Spring Data Neo4j and using Spring Data Neo4j with Spring Data REST
• If that's still not enough Neo4j, if you're in the Bay Area, then you might want to checkout the meetup that Spring Data Neo4J lead Michael Hunger (and I) will be holding this Thursday, May 8th!
• My pal Andy Piper and I gave a talk at SpringOne2GX 2013 about running and writing Spring applications on Cloud Foundry. Check it out!
• Scott Frederick and Cornelia Davis introduce how to add custom services and runtimes to Cloud Foundry in this amazing talk from SpringOne2GX 2013.
• Did you check out the new Project Reactor release? The new release is packed with cool stuff (including API improvements, a general-purpose object pool and a lot more!) and it paves the way for Reactor 2.0, which will base its Promise and Streams support on the Reactive Streams proejct. Nice!
• Phil Whelan over on the ActiveState blog has a nice post introducing buildpacks. Buildpacks came from Heroku, but of course you can use them in Cloud Foundry and - as with ActiveState's own Stackato project - they work with projects that are built on Cloud Foundry.

I'm pleased to announce the release of Spring Security 4.0.0.M1 available in the Spring Milestone repository. The primary component of this first milestone is testing support. Stay tuned to the spring.io blog for a blog series introducing the test support. If you can't wait to try it out, see the tests in the showcase package which demonstrate some of the highlights.

Reference | Javadoc | Guides

Spring Framework 4.0 introduced a new spring-messaging module, adding a selection of Spring Integration types such as the core Message abstraction. Spring 4.1 aligns its JMS support to allow you to benefit from that abstraction. But before diving into that, I'd like to show you in details how we further improved the infrastructure for listener endpoints.

Annotation-driven listener endpoints

You are probably used to the <xyz:annotation-driven> element or the @Enable* counterpart and perhaps you were looking for something similar for JMS. Look no further: the next major release of the Spring…