Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week, the SpringSource and Cloud Foundry teams are OSCON talking about open source enterprise and cloud computing with anybody and everybody. If you're in the region, be sure to check out the SpringSource and Cloud Foundry booth in the exhibition hall!

1. The Spring Data team is working on a book with O'Reilly on Spring Data. If you want to preview and feedback, now's your chance!
2. Are you using Spring Data Commons support for repositories? How would you feel about support for Java-centric configuration? Check out the new support for Java-configuration in Spring Data!

<LI> The Java Beginner's tutorial blog has a quick post on  <a href = "http://javabeginnerstutorial.com/spring-framework-tutorial/configure-hsqldb-java-spring/">how to use the embedded database namespace that debuted in Spring 3.0</A>. The <a href = "http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.1.x/spring-framework-reference/htmlsingle/spring-framework-reference.html#jdbc-embedded-database-support">namespace</A> is great if you want to setup H2, HSQL and Derby instances quickly and then specify initialization <CODE>.SQL</CODE> statements or scripts to run to initialize the database to a…

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring. This week, I'm at JAX in San Francisco. We're having a good time, and happily answering questions from community members. As usual, though, we've got a lot to cover, so let's get on with the show.

1. Martin Lippert has announced the latest versions of SpringSource Tool Suite and the Groovy and Grails Tool Suites.
2. Chris Beams has announced that Spring 3.1.2 has been released!

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   <LI> Rob Winch has announced that <A href = "http://www.springsource.org/node/3588">Spring Security 3.1.1 has been released!  	</A>
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    <LI>  Costin Leau has announced that <A href = "http://www.springsource.org/node/3588">Spring GemFire 1.1.2 has been released!  	</A>
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    <LI>   The Tech Annotation page has a great post on using some of  <a href = "http://techannotation.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/remoting-spring-rmi-and-http/">Spring's remoting technologies, RMI and HTTP invoker, to expose objects  to remote clients</A>.  </LI> 
   
   
   <Li>  
   	Chris Haddad  has   put together a…

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring. Today, we bid farewell to the father of Spring, Rod Johnson. We wish Rod well on his next endeavors.

1. Spring contributor and all-around-build-ninja Chris Beams put together a nice blog talking about some of the infrastructure changes in the Spring projects of late, including their moves to GitHub and to the build-tool Gradle.
2. Martin Lippert has announced the availability of the SpringSource Tool Suites 3.0.0.M2, one for Spring and one for Groovy and Grails.
3. Spring Data Redis 1.0.1 has been released. Among other things the new release supports support for a new (4th) Redis driver SRP, Redis native execution (RedisConnection#execute), and improved pipeline execution tracking potential errors and bulk results consistently across all drivers

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   	<LI> 
   		Gary Russell has announced the availability of <a href ="http://www.springsource.org/node/3586">Spring Integration 2.1.3.RELEASE and  2.2.0.M3</a>. 
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4. Hubert Klein Ikkink has an interesting post on how set environment variables on Cloud Foundry.
5. Jan Machacek announced the latest release of Specs2 Spring 0.6.1 in his blog. Check it out for more details.
6. Matt Vickery is back with another installment on how to use Spring Integration with C24's iO products.
7. Our friend Willie Wheeler has a great post on pageable custom queries with Spring Data JPA.
8. Our friend Roger Hughes is back, this time with a post introducing how to get started with Spring Social.
9. Nicolas Frankel has a nice blog introducing Spring Data JPA.
10. The Java TV tutorial site and aggregator has both of Spring Integration contributor Oleg Zhurakousky's webinars on Spring Integration Tips 'n Tricks. It's nice when the aggregators pick up good content, but readers should also be sure to check out the source for all your SpringSource videos and tutorials, the SpringSource Dev YouTube channel.

11. A blog, seemingly on PHP, has a post on the correct way to utilize <a href = "http://activequestionsphp.16mb.com/correct-way-to-utilize-p-and-util-namespace-in-spring-xml-configuration/">Spring's <CODE>&lt;p&gt;</CODE> and <CODE> &lt;c&gt;</CODE> namespaces. </a>
    
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12. The doanduyhai blog has an interesting post on the Spring 3.1 cache abstraction.
13. The Learning via Code blog has a great post introducing Spring's support for message loading
14. The JavaCode Geeks blog has an interesting post on exception handling in Spring's JSF support
15. Only faintly related to Spring: Joram Barrez, a contributor to the Activiti BPMN2 workflow engine, to which both Spring Batch lead Dr. David Syer and I contributed the Spring support, has put up a nice post comparing the speed of the workflow engine and some of the tests use the Spring support.

The last ten years has been an exciting and challenging journey for me and I’m very proud of the technology and community that my SpringSource cofounders and I fostered. However, there always comes a time to make a choice about the places you’ll go, and it’s time for me to leave VMware and pursue other interests. I wish VMware and my colleagues continued success, and know that Spring will continue to thrive.

Technology

Spring was created to simplify enterprise Java development, and has succeeded in that goal. The Spring community continues to grow, Spring is more widely adopted than ever and Spring has…

The Groovy development team and SpringSource are happy to echo the announcement of the release of Groovy 2.0, the highly popular dynamic language for the Java platform. The key highlights of this important milestone are:

• a static type checker to let the compiler tell you about the correctness of your code,
• static compilation for the performance of the critical parts of your application,
• modularity, splitting the Groovy JAR into smaller feature-oriented JARs and letting you create your own extension modules,
• JDK 7 Project Coin syntax enhancements, so that Groovy is still as friendly as possible with its Java cousin,
• and JDK 7 Invoke Dynamic integration to benefit from the dynamic languages support of the JVM.

To learn more about all those great new features, please read the Groovy 2.0 article on InfoQ that I’ve written, detailing and explaining all those novelties.

To download Groovy 2.0, go to the download area of the Groovy website.

For further information on all the JIRA issues fixed in this release and the various betas and release candidates, you can have a look at the JIRA changelog.

We’d like to thank all our users, all the contributors and committers who made this important release a reality, thanks to their feedback, their…

Introduction

Over the last year a number of significant changes have been made to the infrastructure and processes we use to keep the Spring family of projects running smoothly. You may have seen individual announcements about some of these as they happened, while others may have slipped under your radar. I'll recap these changes below. When put together they portray a bigger picture.

GitHub project hosting

Individual Spring projects have been migrating to Git and GitHub for quite a while. You may recall our announcement last Christmas that the Spring Framework itself had made the move. With the recent migration of Spring Web Flow, we're happy to announce that all major Spring projects are now hosted under the SpringSource organization at GitHub.

There are benefits for project committers and Spring users alike following the move to Git and GitHub. GitHub has an excellent UI for code browsing, history of changes, and commit comments. And with the amazing number of open source projects already hosted at GitHub, this means that you're using one well-understood UI and that you already know how to browse source control, examine recent changes and so on. But GitHub's real power is in the way it encourages and supports community contribution. This point is discussed further in the "contribution process" section below.

For now, check out…

<P> What a week! So much to talk about and scarcely enough minutes in the day to manage.   
Without any further ado, let's get on to it!	</P> 

1. Jonathan Brisbin has announced the availability of Spring Data REST 1.0.0.RC1 . Spring Data REST helps you provide a RESTful interface for your JPA-based repositories.
2. Oliver Gierke has announced Spring Data MongoDB 1.0.2.GA. The new release has plenty of bugfixes and improvements, so check the changelog for more.
3. Wonder what happened to the RabbitMQ webinar that was briefly on the SpringSource events calendar? It was rescheduled (slight schedule mishap), but it's back and you should definitely mark your calendars with the updated dates. It figures to be an amazing event.
4. Our pal Gordon Dickens - a world class trainer and engineer - has been very busy recently.

   	 If you haven't been following his blog recently, you missed an 
   	  <a href ="http://gordondickens.com/wordpress/2012/06/12/springsource_tool_suite_faq/"> introduction to the SpringSource Tool Suite  -  including its composition and value-added features,  and  answers some common questions</A>.
   		
   		 Besides the great post <a href= "http://gordondickens.com/wordpress/2012/06/12/spring-3-1-constructor-namespace">on Spring 3.1's constructor namespace…

<P> This week the I'm at QCon New York talking to people about Spring, Cloud Foundry,  vFabric, and  much more. Attendees at QCon conferences always keep things interesting with great questions and ideas.  
	 

As usual, though, the internet has given us a lot of great content to look at this last week, so let's dive right into the roundup!

</P> 

1. If you missed Gary Russell's excellent webinar introducing managing and monitoring of Spring Integration applications, don't worry, the video is on the SpringSource YouTube channel.

 <LI>  Details of the new  release of <a href = "http://www.springsource.org/node/3573">Spring for Apache Hadoop 1.0.0.M2</A> are available. For information on the project itself, check out this  <a href = "http://blog.springsource.org/2012/06/1…

I am happy to announce that the second milestone (1.0.0.M2) of Spring for Apache Hadoop project is available. In this blog post, I would like to quickly highlight the major new features in M2.

HBase DAO support

One of the most versatile and powerful feature in Spring Framework is the Data Access Object (or DAO) support. With Spring for Hadoop 1.0.0 M2, the same functionality was added for HBase. Users of the popular template and callback pattern should feel right at home as the framework handles the table lookup, resource cleanup and exception conversion, letting the developer focus on what really matters. See the API and reference docs for more information. By the way, we also included a new sample in the distribution, hbase-crud, to help you get started right away.

Cascading Taps

In M2, we have expanded the integration with Cascading library by Taps for Spring Framework and Spring Integration resources. The richness of Spring Integration adapters (whether inbound or outbound) such as File, TCP, Twitter, FTP, RSS (just to name a few) is now available to Cascading (and its extensions such as Cascalog or Scalding). And we are just getting started - expect more news on this front.

Hadoop Security

With M2, moving from a vanilla Hadoop install (such as a dev machine) to a fully Kerberos-secured Hadoop cluster is transparent. The File-System, Map/Reduce and Pig components are all security-aware, executing under proper credentials and supporting user impersonation. See the dedicated chapter for more information.

Enhanced vanilla Map/Reduce support

Since the beginning, Spring for Apache Hadoop offered extensive support for Map/Reduce jobs - whether it is vanilla or traditional Java Map/Reduce, streaming or tooling. In M2, we have added support for Hadoop generic options across the board, making job provisioning, either by naming resources individually or through pattern matching, a one-liner. Further more, we have enhanced the bootstrapping of jar-based jobs - rather then requiring the classes to be on the classpath, the job can be fully loaded, in isolation, from the jar. The classes (and their dependencies) do not leak into the application which avoids all sorts of versioning conflicts and dependency creep. The tool declaration has been improved to automatically read the Jar metadata and its Main-Class, offering a powerful, fully managed replacement to Hadoop shell jar invocations.

Two New Samples

Last but not least, two new samples have been added to the distribution: hbase-crud, which I mentioned before showcasing the declarative and programmatic HBase support and pig-scripting, demoing the JVM and Pig scripting: the former doing data preparations in HDFS for the latter, which does data analysis. There are more samples in the pipeline and if you would like to see anything in particular, tell us.

I hope you enjoy this new milestone. Go ahead, grab 1.0.0 M2, take it for a spin and let us know what you think!

Other News: Project Serengeti

As far as new releases go, Spring for Apache Hadoop 1.0.0 M2 is not the only news on the Hadoop front. Today, VMware takes the curtains off project Serengeti, for virtualized and Highly Available Hadoop. See Richard McDougall's blog post on the motivations behind it, the current status…