If you remember last year, we rolled out a powerful new website built top-to-bottom with Spring. It was fresh, new, and loaded with gobs of getting started guides.

Since then, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We've had record traffic with a large portion visiting the guides. So what's new?

We recently added the ability to hide/show the build steps. Many people expressed the desire to skip project setup steps and instead jump to the core content. We listened and responded.

After reading over a guide, do you need Gradle or Maven build steps? No problem! Just click on the…

Holy cats! Can you believe how close we are to SpringOne2GX? Last year we made a huge splash with the announcements of Spring Boot and Spring XD, both of which have recently hit 1.0 releases. I happen to know the next level looks like, and you're going to want to see it. Register now if you haven't already!

• Spring ninja Greg Turnquist wanted to replace one of the services used in the guides with something more family-friendly and so stood up a bespoke substitute using Spring! This is a really nice read, check it out!
• I hope you'll join me September 16th for a webinar looking at building microservices with Spring
• On September 23rd, join Joram Barrez and I for a webinar looking at how to build process-centric Spring applications with the open-source BPMN2 engine, Activiti
• Patrick Grimard did a really nice job introducing how to build Spring Boot applications using IntelliJ IDEA…

[callout title=Updated Dec 11 2014]Although originally about Spring Security 4.0.0.M2, the blog has been updated to reflect improvements found in Spring Security 4.0 RC1.[/callout]

Introduction

Previously, an application could use Spring Security to perform authentication in a WebSocket application. This worked because the Principal of an HttpServletRequest will be propagated to the WebSocket Session.

The problem is that authorization was limited to handshake. This means that once the connection was made, there was no way to provide any granularity to authorization of the WebSocket application…

I was recently made aware that a public API we were using for one of our guides contained objectionable material. After confirming this, I immediately responded that we would pick another source. Wishing to avoid such an issue in the future, I decided the best solution was to build our own RESTful quote service. So I decided to use the best tools to do so, the Spring stack, and was able to migrate the very next day.

Picking your tools

To kick things off, I made a check list of what I knew would be the right tools for the job of creating a RESTful web service.

• Spring Data JPA - quickly pre-load, fetch, and potentially update content
• Spring MVC - solid REST support since Spring 3
• Spring Boot - create all the needed components with little to no effort
• http://start.spring.io - assemble a project by simply checking the desired items on a form
…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's a few weeks before SpringOne2GX 2014, already! Time sure flies when you're having fun! The beginning of 2015 will mark the 4th year of This Week in Spring, and it's more exciting every week! I'm hoping to see as many of you as possible at SpringOne2GX 2014. This is sure to be an amazing event.

Anyway, with that out of the way, let's get on to this week's roundup!

1. Spring Security lead Rob Winch just announced Spring Security 4.0.0.M2, which

provides a lot of great features, including improved Security-aware testing support, Spring Data integration, support for websocket security, and ties into the nascent Spring Session projet that was derived from the work for this release. Check it out! Rob also announced Spring Security 3.2.5 and 3.1.7…

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…