This Week in Spring - March 12th, 2013

Engineering | Josh Long | March 12, 2013 | ...

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…

Performance Improvements in STS 3.2.0

Engineering | Martin Lippert | March 12, 2013 | ...

The latest release of the Spring Tool Suite (3.2.0) contains a large number of performance improvements in many different areas. We are not only adopting the latest improvements from the Eclipse Juno SR2 maintenance release (which fixes a large number of performance issues with the new Eclipse 4 platform UI), we also worked on the performance of many of the STS internals, specifically targeting Java editing and build times for Spring projects.

To demonstrate the improvements, here is a quick screencast showing STS 3.1.0 and 3.2.0 side-by-side:

There is still more to do and we will continue to work on these areas for the STS 3.3.0 release, scheduled to arrive in July 2013. If you want to know more details, watch for further improvements, submit additional information, and/or report specific performance or memory issues, please watch/use this JIRA ticket: https://issuetracker.springsource.com/browse/STS-3054

Scripted 0.4 released

Engineering | Andy Clement | March 05, 2013 | ...

This week we've released version 0.4 of our JavaScript focused code editor. You can read about the background of Scripted here.

The full release notes for 0.4 are here but in this article I'll call out a few of the more interesting changes.

Tooltips


Scripted uses an inferencing engine to build an understanding of your JavaScript code. Scripted 0.3 provided some basic tooltips showing inferred information about function calls. In Scripted 0.4 this has been taken further - not only better formatting but also any jsdoc discovered is now included in the tooltips. Here you can see the tooltip that will appear when you hover over the function call:


 

Templates


Template support has been enhanced and you can now replace selections with text expansions that embed the original selection. In the first picture we have selected a function call and pressed Ctrl/Cmd+Space:

And on selecting the first template completion the editor contents become:


 

Extensibility


This version of Scripted includes a basic plugin mechanism. It is possible to write just a single .js file, drop it into the right place, and it will extend the behaviour of Scripted. The plugin API is definitely a work-in-progress but you can already achieve some useful functionality. For example we have on-save source transformer plugins that perform operations like removing white space and adding copyright messages. There is more information on the plugin system in the release notes and here in the wiki. Basically plugin development involves writing an AMD module, 'require'ing the API pieces and you are good to go.

One of the key use cases we had in mind was enabling you to write a plugin that contributed new annotations to the editor (that appear in the left hand ruler and allow styling of the editor text) . Here is a very simple plugin. This simply locates the names of fruits in your code and adds annotations for them. Perhaps not the most useful plugin but it should show what the key parts of a plugin are…

This Week in Spring - March 5th, 2013

Engineering | Josh Long | March 05, 2013 | ...

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring.

We've got a lot to cover, though, so let's get to it!

  1. 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!
  2. Join Damien Dallimore and David Turanski on a webinar as they introduce the Webinar: Extending Spring Integration for Splunk - March 28th, 2013
  3. New SpringOne2GX replays now available in HD on YouTube: Spring Data Repositories: A Deep Dive, and Intro to Cascading
  4. @SpringSource is launching a (quick) swag-giveaway campaign!
  5. Spring Security lead and ninja Rob Winch has announced the initial support for Java-based configuration in Spring Security. This is a wonderful milestone. Recently, we've seen Java-configuration alternatives to the XML DSLs offered for Spring Social, Spring Batch and - now - Spring Security. Check out the Spring Security Java-based configuration for more details.
  6. I had the unique privilege of visiting the Alibaba group in China where they're doing some amazing things with Spring. Read more in my blog, Spring at China Scale: the Alibaba group.
  7. Someone asked me this the other day and I felt like it was worthy of a mention: in your Spring MVC @Controller class handler methods, make sure that the BindingResult argument is immediately after the model or command argument, like this:
     <CODE>@RequestMapping(...) public String handleRequest( @ModelAttribute @Valid YourCustomPojo attempt, BindingResult result)</code>. 
    	 
    	 In this example, <CODE>handleRequest</Code> will validate the POJO (<CODE>YourCustomPojo</code>) - checking the POJO for JSR303-annotations and attempting to apply the constraints because the POJO is annotated with <CODE>@Valid</CODE> - and stash any errors  in the <CODE>BindingResult</code>, which it makes available if we ask for it.
    	 
    	 
    
  8. Speaking of validation using JSR 303, I found this amazing post from 2010 that I felt worth inclusion. This post introduces a custom annotation, called @SpelAssert, that works like JSR303's @ScriptAssert.
  9. Do you want to use Cloud Foundry with the continuous integration capabilities offered by CloudBees? We got you covered! The Cloud Foundry and Cloud Bees teams worked to integrate the process, and the step-by-step introduction is given here.
  10. Alvaro Videla has introduced and open-sourced his RabbitMQ simulator. The RabbitMQ simulator is an awesome visualization tool to demonstrate how RabbitMQ topologies work.
  11. Gary Russell has announced that Spring AMQP 1.1.4 is now available.
  12. The Fstyle blog has an interesting post on how to unit test Spring Security with Spring MVC test mocks.
  13. Our pal Boris Lam is back, this time with a post on how to integrate Spring Data, MongoDB and JavaServer Faces.
  14. Indika Prasad, on the Programmer's Guide blog, has put together a tutorial showing how to use Spring Security with Webdav and password encryption.
    </LI>
    <LI> The  <EM>Java J2EE SOA Key Points</EM…

Spring at China Scale: Alibaba Group (Alipay, TaoBao, and TMall)

Engineering | Josh Long | March 04, 2013 | ...

So What Does It Take to Operate at China Scale?

Some of the companies of the Alibaba group

The challenges inherent to building enterprise applications that meet China-scale demand are unparalleled. One exemplary Chinese organization using Spring heavily to solve very unique challenges is the Alibaba group. Alibaba is itself an online auction site, like eBay in the west. The Alibaba group in turn owns a few other online service companies, like Alipay (a secure transaction processor, like PayPal in the west), TaoBao (a comparison shopping engine, like Shopzilla in the west), and TMall (an e-tailer, exposing the catalogues of merchants, like Amazon in the west).

From the InfoQ article, "on 11 November, 2012 (the Double Sticks promotion day), Tmall and Taobao witnessed 147 million user visits, purchases of 30 million people and nearly 100 million paid orders. At 0:00, more than 10 million users were concurrently online." The "double sticks promotion day" is celebrated as a sort of day to honor the single people out there. People make blind-dates, attend speed-dating events, and - somewhat like cyber monday shopping in the US - look for good deals from merchants. TaoBao reported USD $3 billion dollars for a single 24 hour period

This Week in Spring - Feb 26th, 2013

Engineering | Josh Long | February 27, 2013 | ...

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's been an exciting two weeks for Hadoop content - Hadoop enthusiasts should check last week's post for an HD quality replay of Building Big Data Pipelines with Spring Hadoop from SpringOne 2GX 2012.

  1. Costin Leau has announced that Spring for Apache Hadoop 1.0 has gone GA!
    	This marks the end of a year in development from the time of the first betas.  There's a lot in this release. For  more information, check out  the blog. </LI>
    
    <LI>Did you guys hear about yesterday's announcement from <A href="http://www.greenplum.com/blog/topics/hadoop/introducing-pivotal-hd">about Pivotal HD, a Hadoop distribution which performs better than the competition, provides a true SQL interface, and features extra tools</a> (like an admin console and an installation, configuration and management facility) and is bundled with Spring for Apache Hadoop? 
    

    The release was in the news a lot yesterday. Here's a nice post on GigaOm, another on
    CIO , and yet another on CRN and another still on Silicon Angle

Spring for Apache Hadoop 1.0 Goes GA

Engineering | Costin Leau | February 26, 2013 | ...

We are happy to announce the first GA release (1.0) for Spring for Apache Hadoop, almost one year to the date from the release of its first milestone release. During that time we have incorporated a great deal of your feedback to drive the road-map, so thanks everyone from the community who have helped! While new features have been added over the year, the goal of Spring for Apache Hadoop remains the same, to simplify the development of Hadoop based applications.

Download it now, or view the maven artifacts here.

Simplified Programming Model & Consistency

What we have observed is that using the standard out of the box tools that come with Hadoop, you an easily end up with Hadoop applications that are poorly structured collection of command line utilities, scripts and pieces of code stiched together. The different origins of the various projects in the Hadoop ecosystem, such as Hive and Pig focusing on declarative usage or Cascading and HBase for a programmatic angle, have led to different approaches to configuration and API designs.

 

Spring for Apache Hadoop provides a consistent programming and configuration…

This Week in Spring - Feb 19th, 2013

Engineering | Josh Long | February 19, 2013 | ...

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Atlanta, GA with a few other SpringSource colleagues talking to developers at the DevNexus Java conference and - tomorrow - speaking at the Atlanta Spring User Group. This show is bigger and better than ever this year! I love the energy and community here.

If you're in Atlanta, GA, drop by the eHire labs (see the link above for the address) tomorrow night for the Spring User Group and we'll talk about REST, Spring MVC, Spring for Android, Spring Mobile, and more! I look forward to seeing you.

As usual, though, we've got a lot to cover, so let's get to it!

  1. The Spring Data release train "Arora" is now avialable, a synchronized, tested release of all Spring Data sub projects - check it out now!
  2. Craig Walls has announced that Spring Social 1.1.0.M2 has been released ! The new release incorporates tighter integration with Spring Security and a slew of new features.
  3. Jeremy Grelle has announced When.js 1.8.0 which is cujojs's lightweight Promises/A implementation.
  4. <LI>  Gary Russell <a href  = "http://www.springsource.org/node/3813">has announced Spring Integration 3.0.0 M1</a>. 
     There are no major new features in this first milestone, it is mainly refactoring, removing deprecations, etc. Browse the documentation 'what's new' and the release notes for more information.
    
    		 
    
  5. Register now to talk with Sam Brannan and Rossen Stoyanchev on Feb 21st in the Webinar: Testing Web Applications with Spring 3.2
  6. New replays from SpringOne2012 - talks from the Data and Integration track talks starting to hit YouTube. Check out Gary Russell's Monitoring and Managing Spring Integration Part 2, and Hadoop / Big Data enthusiasts shouldn't miss Costin's talk How to build Big Data Pipelines for Hadoop using OSS.
  7. As a bonus session this week, we've also released Spring Data REST: Easily export JPA entities directly to the web.
  8. Krishna's blog has a nice post on using CAS (single signon using Jasig) with Spring Security.
  9. Sergei Sizov has put together a nice post on using Spring Security and HTTP Basic authentication.
  10. The Lucky Ryan blog has a very nice post introducing HDIV - which can be used to prevent cross site request forgery (CSRF), remove the ability to alter non-editable data (hidden fields, params…) and even has options to limit characters globally across form fields - and explaining how to use HDIV with Spring MVC.
  11. Your remoting layer (the layer that's exposed over the network) might simply surface the domain model objects from your services layer. Often, however, the object sent across the wire is a slightly different version of the data used by the service. Perhaps fields are omitted because they contain too much data. Perhaps extra fields are added to communicate metadata about the service itself. Perhaps you simply want to flatten two different types into a single object for ease-of-transport. Whatever the reason, the common pattern (or anti-pattern) to handling this is a DTO (data transfer object). We had these before with EJBs and DCOM and CORBA. Now we have them with REST. If you find you have to have DTOs, the jtransfo library introduced in this post seems like it might be helpful in reducing the tedious adapters from DTO to domain object. The post explains how to use JTransfo to automatically handle adapting domain objects to DTOs.
  12. The Fahd.blog blog has a nice introduction to Spring Batch's RetryTemplate. This is a very powerful component of Spring Batch that doesn't get enough love, so I am glad to see this post!
  13. The Learn and Shine blog has a nice post introducing how to use Spring MVC to render XSLT views.
  14. The Java Ninja Chronicles By Norris Shelton, Jr blog has a very concise post on how he took the first steps in using Spring's Java configuration style to make short work of loading properties from an exotic source.

This Week in Spring - Feb 12th, 2013

Engineering | Josh Long | February 12, 2013 | ...

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

  1. Dave Syer is taking his SpringOne2GX talk to an online audience on Feb 14th, 2013 Webinar - When and Why Would I Use OAuth2?
  2. Dream team Sam Brannen (Swiftmind) & Rossen Stoyanchev (SpringSource) join forces on Feb 21st, 2013 for a Webinar: Testing Web Applications with Spring 3.2
  3. New SpringOne2GX 2012 talks released to YouTube in HD! Ten Great Reasons to Virtualize Your Java Apps, and What's New in CloudFoundry.
  4. Our pal Boris Lam is back, this time with two posts on how to use Spring Data MongoDB and JSF together.
  5. The PluralSight blog has a video introduction to Spring MVC interceptors. This video is an excerpt from a full-fledged video course.
    </LI>
    <LI>  Cool demonstration: <A href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTxd0PGDaMI&list=UU7yfnfvEUlXUIfm8rGLwZdA&index=1">Spring Insight plugins for Spring Integration and RabbitMQ</a>. 
    
  6. The syntx blog has a nice post on how to add HTTP Basic authentication using Spring Security to Spring MVC-secured resources.
  7. Krishna's Blog has a nice post introducing unit-testing the Spring Security layer with the InMemoryDaoImpl.
  8. <LI>  You know, I was looking for something like this just the other day!  <EM>Mark's Blog </EM> has a nice post on the <A href="http://markchensblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/how-spring-mvc-works.html"> workflow of the various objects in servicing an incoming HTTP request in Spring MVC</a>.  Is this stuff you could easily figure out by sticking a breakpoint in a controller and just looking at the call stack…

This Week in Spring - Feb 5th, 2013

Engineering | Josh Long | February 06, 2013 | ...

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring --

There's some great video content is available online this week, so be sure to check the content out. Also, you asked and we are delivering - we now maintain an single index page for all SpringOne2GX recordings along with the link to the InfoQ page for their recordings of the event. On with the roundup!

  1. Rossen Stoyanchev has announced the 2.4M1 and 2.3.2 releases of Spring Web Flow.
  2. Dream team Sam Brannen (Swiftmind) & Rossen Stoyanchev (SpringSource) join forces on Feb 21st, 2013 for a Webinar: Testing Web Applications with Spring 3.2
  3. Dave Syer is taking his SpringOne2GX talk to an online audience on Feb 14th, 2013 When and Why Would I Use OAuth2?
  4. Jeremy Grelle's talk from SpringOne2GX 2012 introducing practical patterns for asynchronous, push-enabled applications is now available online.
  5. Craig Walls' presentation from SpringOne2GX 2012 Introducing Spring Social is now available on YouTube in HD.
  6. Craig Walls' Javascript - focused talk from SpringOne2GX 2012 Client Side UI Smackdown, is now available on YouTube in HD.
  7. Over on InfoQ China (where the content is in Chinese...), blogger Ding Xuefeng has done a marvelous job shining a light on some of the various Spring sub-projects, including Spring Data, Spring Batch, Spring Integration. Definitely worth a read!
  8. The slides from Spring framework committer Sam Brannen's talk on Spring Framework 3.2 are available, and make for a fascinating read.
  9. This blog explains how to lookup and use a JavaMail Session as configured in Tomcat's JNDI from a Spring application.
  10. The softtech blog has a code-heavy post introducing how to create a one-to-many relationship using Spring Data JPA.
  11. <LI>The <EM>Guident</EM> blog has a nice <a href="http://blog.guident.com/2013/01/spring-into-apache-hadoop/">post introducing  Spring Data Hadoop's support for HBase.</a> </LI>
    
    <LI> The <EM>Dinesh on Java</EM> blog has a nice post on  <A href="http://www.dineshonjava.com/2013/01/spring-data…

Get the Spring newsletter

Thank you for your interest. Someone will get back to you shortly.

Get ahead

VMware offers training and certification to turbo-charge your progress.

Learn more

Get support

Tanzu Spring Runtime offers support and binaries for OpenJDK™, Spring, and Apache Tomcat® in one simple subscription.

Learn more

Upcoming events

Check out all the upcoming events in the Spring community.

View all