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	<P> 
		Well, it's that time of the year again!  

The holiday season is upon us and many people will be celebrating! No matter what holiday you're celebrating (or if you're celebrating at all), let me wish you a wonderful week and the happiest of holidays.
To tide you over we've packed this week's roundup to the brim.
Enjoy!

1. Santa's elves could learn a thing or two from the SpringSource engineers! Alan Stewart announced Spring Roo 1.2.0 GA on Saturday. This version of Roo has caught the attention of a lot of people. While there are many new features, some of my favorites are the multi-module Maven project support (which lets you, for example, build your model classes in a separate project from your web application), support JSF / PrimeFaces scaffolding (as opposed to just GWT, Spring MVC, Vaadin, and Flex), support for services / repositories (using Spring Data JPA and Spring Data MongoDB; this is in addition to the Active record style data-access objects…

It is my pleasure to announce that Spring Roo 1.2 GA has just been released. This release represents a significant amount of engineering effort by the Roo team and includes all the most popular features that the Roo user community have requested as well as many performance and usability improvements. The new features of Roo 1.2.0 are:

• Apache 2.0 licensed
• Multi-module Maven project support
• JSF / PrimeFaces scaffolding
• Services / repositories (using Spring Data JPA and Spring Data MongoDB)
• Database reverse engineering multi-schema support
• Flexible GWT support
• Shell usability improvements

Alan Stewart Spring Roo Project Lead

Today saw the release of the Spring framework, version 3.1, the next step in enterprise Java development.

  	There is a <EM>lot</EM> of other stuff to talk about this week, but we'll
  	forego them for next week, because there's quite simply too much to look at with Spring 3.1.  

  	Take a look at the following content, and don't forget to download (<A href="http://www.springsource.com/download/community?project=Spring%20Framework&version=3.1.0.RELEASE">direct</a> or <a href="http://www.springsource.org/spring-core#download">maven</a>) and try out the latest and greatest bits today! 
 

And, of course, for all the gritty details of what's new, check out the Spring Framework 3.1 release notes.

Among my favorite new features in this release:

<ul> <LI>
Comprehensive Java-based application configuration</LI>
</LI> <lI>New caching abstraction
</LI…

Welcome to this final Countdown to Grails 2.0 post: the final release is imminent! I'm not really going to say much here because some of the most interesting new features of Grails 2.0 are much better seen. For that reason, I've created a screencast so you can see exactly what awaits you when you install Grails 2.0 for the first time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJMR0gB6NHk

The key aspects are:

• a whole new interactive console;
• better automatic class reloading, including support for domain classes and Java files;
• enhanced error reporting;
• new HTML 5 scaffolding; and
• new test reports.

As shown in the screencast, the new interactive console comes with: auto-completion on commands; execution of external applications using "bang" (!) commands; a command history buffer; and easy access to test and dependency reports. This is backed up by a much improved reloading mechanism for Grails classes. You don't need to restart run-app…

It is my pleasure to announce that Spring Framework 3.1 becomes generally available today! This release delivers several key features that make Spring ready for the challenges of 2012 and beyond:

• The environment abstraction and the associated bean definition profiles, along with centrally configurable property sources for placeholder resolution.

• Java-based application configuration based on @Enable* annotations on configuration classes, allowing for convenient container configuration: e.g. using @EnableTransactionManagement to activate declarative transaction processing.

• The cache abstraction with our declarative caching solution (@Cacheable etc) on top, focusing on convenient interaction between application code and cache providers.

• The Servlet 3.0 based WebApplicationInitializer mechanism for bootstrapping a Spring web application without web.xml! This is a key piece in Spring's web configuration story, providing a rich alternative to XML-based bootstrapping.

  …

Spring Integration scripting support, available in the 2.1 release, builds upon the Groovy scripting support introduced in 2.0.  If you are familiar with Spring Integration, consider scripting support as another tool in your toolbox that you will find useful in certain situations.  If you have existing code written in languages such as Groovy, Python, Ruby, or Javascript and need to integrate them with each other or into a Java application,  Spring Integration provides a simple way to do this.  Whatever the case, this post covers the basics to get you started using your favorite scripting…

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring.

     We're in December, folks. I just can't believe that it's already December. 

Um, OK, ignore me.
Just astonished. Let's get into the roundup because there is a lot of new content this week.

1. Did you miss SpringOne? Well, that's a shame. You missed out on a lot. However, don't fret, our friends at InfoQ are riding to the rescue with a steady stream of videos from the different talks at SpringOne2GX. The first two talks on the docket? The opening keynote with SpringSource CTO Adrian Colyer, SpringOne 2Gx Keynote - Spring, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.

   		On day two, <a href= "http://www.springsource.org/node/3322">Ben Alex lead the SpringOne 2GX technical keynote</a>, a procession of 
   		  demonstrations and thought provoking insights into next generation application development with Spring and on the cloud.
   		
   		 </LI> 
   		
   		
   		<LI> <a href = "http://www.twitter.com/ramnivas">Ramnivas Laddad</a>, all around great guy and one of the brilliant, mad…

It's been a while since the last Countdown blog post, but the release of 2.0.0.RC3 gives me a good reason to write another. In the last post, I focused on database migration and how we are standardising on the new Database Migration Plugin. I'll be continuing on the theme of persistence here and introducing several great new features, particularly around querying.

Miscellaneous

Let's start with some of the minor improvements. First, abstract domain classes are now treated as most people would expect: an abstract base domain class results in a table for it and its subclasses. For example, consider the…