Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. This week has been an amazing week! I started it in Krakow, Poland, talking to developers at the wonderful 33rd Degree conference, then headed to Warsaw, Poland, where I presented at the amazing local Spring Labs user group. Tomorrow, it's off to London for Devoxx UK where I'll be helping spread the Spring Boot awesome. Then, Friday, it's off to Toronto where I'll be meeting with 4 customers and teams using Spring next week. What's this mean for you? Well, for one, if you're in London and Toronto, say hi! It also means that conference season is on in full force. We try to be wherever we're needed. What conferences (besides SpringOne2GX 2014, of course!) are you going to this year? I'd love to know which conferences you're doing this year. Help us prioritize, please. Thanks! (Twitter hashtag #twiSpring)

• Spring Boot 1.1's been released! It includes new support for GSP, Spring Social, Velocity, Freemarker, Spring Mobile, Spring HATEOAS, and much, much, more. LOTS of new autoconfiguration support too: GemFire, HornetQ, Elasticsearch, Solr, Spring Social, Spring Integration, Spring Mobile and Spring HATEOAS. Honestly, you might just be better off reading the blog and coming back. There's so much awesome there.
• Our CFSummit conference is being held right now in San Francisco! There's lots of amazing stuff around Cloud Foundry. I found more than a few press announcements, but here's one from eWeek on some of the new stuff in PCF 1.3.
• If you are not the the CloudFoundry Summit in San Francisco this week, you may have missed Matt Stine's amazing talk: Cloud Foundry and Microservices: A Mutualistic Symbiotic Relationship. You heard it here first: CloudFoundry and Spring Boot are going to make a killer combination for Microservices.
• In celebration of the Spring Boot release, the amazing Greg Turnquist is presenting Building your app management tools with Spring Boot on July 8th.
• Join Glenn Renfro as he takes you through Spring Integration 4.0's Boot/JavaConfig/Annotation driven experience in Spring Integration Done Boot-ifully on June 17th.
• Casey Doolittle and Phil Dutson present the ultimate e-commerce feature fire drill: Building a Shopping Cart in 24 Hours using Spring on July 15th
• Check out this replay of the talk from last year's SpringOne2GX 2013, SpringOne2GX 2013 Replay: Space Exploration: APIs for Secure Interconnected HTML5 Applications with Sencha Space
• The amazing Craig Walls gave a great talk on Spring Social last year at SpringOne2GX 2013, check it out! Spring Social 1.1 just dropped, after all. Now's a good time to catch up and get connected to the services your customers are.
• Greg Turnquist published a very nice blog on the process of contributing a Spring IO guide. Greg's also one of the main contributors to the guides, so if he approves, then you know it's good. Rock on, open source!
• Speaking of that new guide, you should check it out: it's about how to get started building a SOAP service with Spring WS. (Hey, it's still a thing for a lot of people, and Spring WS's new Java configuration-based endpoint model is very well suited to the task!)
• Ramnivas Laddad, one of the brains behind AspectJ, one of the architects behind Cloud Foundry, and our local cloud ninja, recently did a webinar on Spring Cloud, which makes it easy to consume PaaS-bound services in a clean, dependency-injection centric way: check it out!
• Manuel Jordan, an amazing member of our community (editor on a few of my books, winner of the Springy Award for his amazing contributions on the forum where he answered more questions than anyone, and all around nice guy) in Arequipa, Peru, put together an epic series of blogs introducing various parts of Spring. Check them out. Great job, Manuel!
• The softwarecave blog has a post on using Hibernate with Spring. I dig it, but would remind people that there's little to no reason to use XML anymore, and - even if there were a reason, there's little to no reason to write this sort of configuration anymore, at all. Just use Spring Boot. It's amazing what a difference an @EnableAutoConfiguration makes!
• The GeekAByte blog has a nice post on the various types of annotation-centric autowiring possible with Spring. Check it out!

Greetings Spring community,

Today we have just published the first getting started guide written and submitted by a community member: Producing a SOAP web service.

Maciej Walkowiak crafted a guide that served his needs and decided to contribute to the community. It lined up with expressed interest in such a guide from others. Maciej used https://github.com/spring-guides/getting-started-guide as his template and submitted a pull request to it containing his crafted guide.

We were able to merge all of his commits into an independent repository, apply some editorial polish, and after final review…

Developing, deploying, and operating cloud applications should be as easy as (if not easier than) local applications. That is and should be a governing principle behind any cloud platform, library, or tool. Spring Cloud--an open-source library--makes it easy to develop JVM applications for the cloud. With it, applications can connect to services and discover information about the cloud environment easily in multiple clouds such as Cloud Foundry and Heroku. Further, you can extend it to other cloud platforms and new services.

In this blog (first in a series), I will introduce Spring Cloud and show its usage from the application developer point of view. We will develop a simple application and deploy to Cloud Foundry and Heroku…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. This week's an exciting week! Well, let's be honest. They're all exciting weeks. But in particular, this week's going to make a lot of people happy. Watch the blog and I'll see you back here next week to recap! :)

1. Oh my goodness! Spring Boot 1.1.0.RC1 is now available! The new release maintains the epic with support for Spring Data Elasticsearch, HornetQ, and Spring Social, and a lot more! Grab the latest release, kick the tires, and feedback on Twitter or GitHub.
2. Dr. Mark Pollack has just announced that the latest release of Spring XD, 1.0.0.M7 is now available. The new release provides a lot of great new features. My favorite is the ability to pin data to a certain stream - think of this as correllation using a message's content - so that you can preserve stateful operations. Think of this as a great way to route and divide messages based on a useful business key. There's a great example in the release notes.
3. Azul rockstar Gil Tene gave an amazing talk on reducing latency for SpringOne2gX 2013 that is now available online. Gil is one of our industry's mad scientists. I haven't yet seen this talk, but I will, and I highly recommend that you do too. Azul makes high performance, low latency JVMs both as appliances and as deliverable software. His talks thus stem from a lot of thankless research and development that I'd just as soon spare myself by watching, and learning from, his talks. Go, Gil!
4. June webinars are here! Michael Minella in Spring Batch 3.0.0 on June 10th, and Glenn Renfro in Spring Integration Done Boot-ifully on June 17th.
5. Spring ninja Greg Turnquist has put together a teaser post on using the amazing when.js Promises/A+ implementation in a front-end REST client in advance of his SpringOne2GX 2014 talk. Check out the post and his talk at the conference!
6. Ramnivas Laddad, a Spring ninja, original AspectJ leaders, and architects behind Cloud Foundry, has just posted a very cool look at Spring Cloud, which makes consuming client services from different middle/infrastructure services (a database, a message queue) on various Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaSes) a simple matter of platform-decoupling configuration.
7. The replay of ADP's Jeffery Sologov's talk looking at the pitfalls of building large scale applications is now up! Check it out!
8. ttp://twitter.com/JakubJirutka chimed in to tell us about this epic Spring Expression Language (SpEL)-powered implementation of the Bean Validation API (JSR 303/349). The GitHub offers an interesting point, "it’s especially very useful for cross-field validations that are very complicated with a plain Bean Validation." I love the examples, too:

    
   @SpELAssert(value = "password.equals(passwordVerify)",
           applyIf = "password || passwordVerify",
           message = "{validator.passwords_not_same}")
   public class User {
     private String password;
     private String passwordVerify;
   }
   

   Nice job!

9. A hat tip to the amazing Brian Dussault for finding this: Zuul is a nifty looking application configuration management solution that offers a clean Spring client API.

10. You know what made my day yesterday? A HystrixInvocationHandler. An InvocationHandler is used by the JDK (and Spring's rich proxying subsystem) to create proxies that wrap beans. This InvocationHandler wraps method invocations on a given bean in Netflix's OSS Hystrix project's Command objects. Hystrix Commands wrap functionality and provide/support resiliency patterns. I can't wait to see more of what becomes of Spencer Gibb's Halfpipe project!
11. Our pal David Welch is at it again, this time with an interesting project called Spring Tiered, which aims to simplify even further (and normalize) the development of HATEOAS based services. Interesting...
12. Also, speaking of building (and consuming) resilient services, check out Chris Richardson's fantastic talk from SpringOne2GX 2013 on powerful abstractions for consuming services asynchronously.
13. Also, I put together a post talking about getting started with Maven (and alternatives) and Spring

Greetings Spring community!

Roy Clarkson and I are presenting a talk at this year's SpringOne 2014 conference called Spring Data REST - Data Meets Hypermedia. We will explore how to quickly bridge the gap between a powerful Spring Data backend and a hypermedia enabled, RESTful front end.

In one part of the talk, we will delve into a javascript front end that lets the user takes pictures and upload them to a website. The website turns around and fetches images from the back end. By itself, this isn't that difficult thanks to the fully loaded RESTful API provided by Spring Data REST.

But fetching multiple images straight up isn't very efficient and is prone to freeze the web browser. Thanks to the CujoJS guys on our team (Brian Cavalier and John Hann), I was able to use the recently released when.js module…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! Here in the States we had a 3-day weekend, which was nice. Good chance to watch some of those amazing tech talks! If you're like me, you've run out of tech talks, and will be glad to see that we have a lot more going up today!

1. Grails project lead Graeme Rocher just announced Grails 2.4! The new release is amazing for a slew of reasons, not the least of which is that some of its many amazing features are easy to use with Spring Boot, too. Double win! Congratulations, Graeme and team. (And also thank you, for another amazing release!)
2. Spring Boot 1.1.0.M2 is now available! The new release features improved support for Spring Data Solr, Spring Data Gemfire, and the entire Spring Data Dijkstra release train. The new release also offers GSP (Groovy Server Pages) and Velocity as templating options, along with upgrades to various libraries like Spring Security 3.2.4, and Spring Batch 3.0. This release train is moving quickly, so jump onboard while you can! There's a lot more great stuff, so check out the release notes.
3. June webinars are here! Ramnivas Laddad on launches Spring Cloud on June 3rd in Abstracting PaaS services to be portable with Spring Cloud, Michael Minella in Spring Batch 3.0.0 on June 10th, and Glenn Renfro in Spring Integration Done Boot-ifully on June 17th.
4. This blog introduces some of the limitations of Hibernate's inbuilt JDBC logging and then introduces log4jdbc as used in a simple Spring / Hibernate application.
5. Our pal Eugen Paraschiv has put together a very nice introduction to Spring Data JPA.
6. Matti Tahvonen over on the Vaadin team put together this fantastic introduction to using Spring Data Neo4j, Spring Boot, and of course the Vaadin4Spring library that Petter Holmström and I started. To be fair, it's only usable because of Petter :) So usable, in fact, that Matti was able to put together something beautiful - Bootiful - very quickly. Check it out! The application models (and visualizes!) data stored in Neo4j, so it's not just any old CRUD application, this is very cool!
7. CloudFoundry ninja James Bayer announced the new Pivotal CF 1.2, which now supports VMWare's Hybrid Cloud Service, initial auditing and autoscaling, new data services (Redis, MongoDB, Neo4j, RiakCS, and ElasticSearch are all available!), and a lot more!
8. Curiousity piqued? Want to learn more about CloudFoundry, the open-source Paas from Pivotal? Check out this epic video on how to setup your own Paas using BOSH from SpringOne2GX 2013. And hear about how other teams acutally did it in the SprignOne2GX replay - Free Yourself with CloudFoundry: A Private Cloud Experience.
9. Data ninja Thomas Risberg just announced the new Spring for Apache Hadoop RC4 release, which is awesome! The new release improves upon the Spring YARN integration. YARN, of course, is the distributed, generic runtime on top of which Hadoop 2.0's very specific map/reduce support now sits. You can use YARN for job distribution of your own, however. You might, for example, use YARN to split up Spring Batch workloads. In the new example, Janne Valkealahti demonstrates a simple Spring Boot-powered Spring YARN component. It's amazing how concise this stuff is now!
10. Want to learn more about Janne Valkealahti, the mad (data) scientist behind our Spring YARN support? Check out this Pivotal People profile!
11. Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke does a nice job introducing the new hotness in Spring Data Dijkstra, the new Spring Data umbrella release. This release includes Java 8 Optional support, asynchronous repository method invocations, and more.
12. Spring Security lead Rob Winch has just two small, bugfixe releases: Spring LDAP 2.0.2, and Spring Security 3.2.4
13. Spring Web Services lead Arjen Poutsma has just announced Spring Web Services 2.2.0, which now features a Java configuration API and much more.
14. Let me take a moment to remind everyone: Java configuration is everywhere! Spring framework, Boot, Data, Security, MVC, Integration, Batch, Social, and much more, all offer as-rich-as-the-XML Java configuration integrations. In the case of Boot, Java configuration is the only out-of-the-box option, though of course you can use XML if you'd like. It's just.. not expected.
15. Spring Security lead also blogged about using Spring Security Test to handle web security
16. Want to write your own Spring Boot starter? Check out this example from Spring ninja Stephane Nicoll on how to provide a HornetQ starter for Spring Boot
17. At long last, Spring Social Google 1.0.0.GA has been released! Congratulations, Gabriel, on all the work required to arrive here. I like the easy-to-use example, too.
18. Arnaud Giuliani has put together a very cool look at using GWT with Spring Boot. Nicely done, Arnaud!
19. Netflix engineer Tomas Lin tweeted a link to a convenient Spring MVC exception handler for REST APIs. This is one (fine) way to approach the problem. As an alternative, I'd suggest you take a look at [using Spring HATEOAS' VndError(s) support]a).

With the release of Spring Boot 1.1.0.M2 came the support for the new template engine that Groovy 2.3 provides. In this post, we will describe the benefits of using such an engine and of course how you can use it in Boot.

All the source code in this post is available on GitHub, so feel free to clone the repository and give it a try:

git clone https://github.com/melix/springboot-groovytemplates.git
cd springboot-groovytemplates
./gradlew run

Then open your browser on http://localhost:8080

This application is fully written in Groovy and also makes use of GORM for Boot, but it is of course…

Spring Boot 1.1.0.M2 is available now in the Spring repositories. There are quite a few new features and plenty of new documentation:

• Groovy Template and Velocity support for MVC and offline rendering.

• Big changes to the HealthIndicator interface and the existing implementations, e.g. all database backends (like Mongo etc.) have a default HealthIndicator and the Actuator aggregates them all up into a single readout.

• Support for Spring Data Solr and Spring Data Gemfire, and upgrade to the Spring Data Dijkstra release train

• Support for multiple DataSources through a convenient

DataSourceBuilder abstraction, plus a similar feature for JPA …

[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]

In my previous blog we demonstrated how the new Spring Security testing support can ease testing method based security. In this blog we will explore how we can use the testing support with Spring MVC Test.

Setting Up MockMvc and Spring Security

In order to use Spring Security with Spring MVC Test it is necessary to add the Spring Security FilterChainProxy as a Filter. For example:

@RunWith(SpringJUnit…