It’s JavaOne time again and this year you’ll find sessions on how Spring works with Java SE to address Big Data, NoSQL, and enterprise integration challenges. We’ve always worked hard to ensure that Spring remains at the forefront of enterprise Java by providing timely support for emerging trends and technologies. The numbers suggest that our users appreciate this. A recent report from Evans Data ("Spring Source Usage Study," Evans Data Corporation, September 2011) shows:

• Spring is the framework of choice among expert Java developers. More than two thirds of Java developers are either using Spring today or planning to do so
• Spring usage continues to grow. More than half of existing Spring users expect to grow or significantly grow their use of Spring.
• Spring is delivering results. 70% of Spring users indicate at least a 50% productivity gain by using Spring and 73% indicate at least a 50% time reduction to deliver a completed project.
• Spring users are at the forefront of enterprise Java. Spring users are more cloud ready, and Spring adopters are more likely to have already deployed applications to the cloud.

Spring has always offered deployment flexibility. In the early days this meant a choice of application servers, but now this extends to choice of cloud platforms including our own Cloud Foundry. Spring has always provided strong data access support. In the early days this meant a choice of approaches for accessing a relational database, today this extends to a range of Big Data and NoSQL stores, data processing, and in-memory data grid capabilities. Spring has always valued developer productivity and provided first class support for writing server-side web applications. Today this extends to meet the modern requirements of HATEOAS-based REST APIs.

These are real and pressing concerns within the enterprise today. Cloud is everywhere, and now Big Data is firmly on the enterprise project radar too, creating a range of new requirements:

• Big Data: the need to store and get analytics from gigabytes, terabytes or petabytes of unstructured or semi-structured data
• Fast Data: the increasing need for low latency interactions with large sets of data, often driven by today’s mobile and social apps
• Flexible Data: the need to adapt data access to the most appropriate model for each application
• Cloud Delivery: the growing demand to access data as a service, provisioned on the cloud of your choice.

The latest Harvard Business Review survey indicates that 85% of organizations have Big Data initiatives planned or in progress. Application developers need to deliver capable, high quality solutions that integrate with this new world and can be deployed anywhere, on or off premise. NoSQL and NewSQL are also being used to address a wide range of use cases including:

• Managing large data streams of non-transactional data (logs, clickstreams)
• Fraud detection
• Timelines (a la Twitter)
• Synching offline and online data
• Online gaming
• Document, catalog and content management
• Archiving - storing a large continual stream of data that is still accessible on-line
• Embedded systems (small footprint databases in devices)

See this High Scalability blog entry for more details.

451 Research’s recent survey data highlights the changing shape of the data landscape. One size no longer fits all.

Enterprise developers can start taking advantage of these new technologies today with Spring and the familiar Spring programming model. Spring offers:

• Big Data processing via Spring Data’s support for Apache Hadoop and HBase, as well as Spring Batch and Spring Integration
• In-Memory data grid support via Spring Data GemFire
• Support for NoSQL key-value stores with Spring Data Redis
• Support for NoSQL document stores with Spring Data MongoDB
• Support for NoSQL graph databases with Spring Data Neo4j
• Support for NewSQL databases with SQLFire
• And of course traditional relational databases, such as MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, and DB2, still have their place and can be accessed via Spring JPA and Spring JDBC Extensions, and made accessible via Spring Data REST

The thriving open source community around NoSQL, together with Spring, makes developing for the next generation of data stores and data processing more productive today. We don’t provide a single Java API for all persistence stores; this is not realistic given the fundamental differences between them. But we do provide a common and familiar programming model based on the concepts of templates and, where available, repositories. See Tobias Trelle’s recent InfoQ article for more details.

All in all, JavaOne 2012 is sure to be an action packed week, full of great Java tech talks, keynotes, and sessions including coverage of our own Big Data, NoSQL, and integration initiatives. Developers who want to get hands on with these technologies now also won't want to miss SpringOne 2GX in Washington DC October 15-18, 2012. We have a packed technical agenda covering all aspects of modern enterprise application development.

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring! There's so much good stuff to look at this week. Can you believe we're already staring down October?

It's time to think about who or what you are going to be for halloween!

With October comes SpringOne2GX, the premier event for Spring developers. Check out the final schedule of speakers and sessions for this year's event! SpringOne 2GX is your opportunity to learn from development leads and published authors on the Spring, Groovy/Grails, Tomcat and Cloud technologies.

1. The video from Spring Security lead Rob Winch's webinar introducing Spring Security is now available.
2. Oleg Zhurakousky kicks off the march to Spring Integration 2.2 with a blog introducing the new MongoDB features in 2.2.
3. Gary Russell has announced release candidate 1 of Spring Integration 2.2.

         This is intended to be the final release before GA, so users are encouraged to give feedback on this release.  
   
   </LI>
   

4. Costin Leau has announced the 1.0.0.RC1 release of Spring Shell, which is an extraction of the shell used in Spring Roo and made available through the Spring programming model.

      </LI>
   

5. Roger Hughes is back at it again, this time with a look at Spring 3.1 caching and configuration options, specifically focusing on setting up a CacheManager.
6. The vFabric blog has an interesting look at the "split-agent" architecture behind Spring Insight, that allows the separation of the collection stage from the analysis one.
7. Krishna Prasad has a nice post on obtaining test coverage information for Spring Web Flow applications.
8. Mattias Severson has a nice post on handling errors in Spring MVC-based RESTful application.
9. Ronillo Ang's put together a very brief deck on the fundamental pieces of a Spring MVC application.
10. The JavaCode Geeks blog has a nice post on writing persistence layers with the Spring framework.
11. L'Artech blog has a cool post on creating the login form for a web application using Spring MVC, in part 3 of a series.

Introduction

Spring Integration 2.2 introduces extended support for synchronizing non-transactional resources with transactions.

Background

It is often used, for example, to synchronize a JMS commit with a JDBC commit.

Spring Integration has long supported this feature, by defining a <transactional/> element on a poller. This release takes this feature one step further, by allowing synchronization of non-transactional resources with a transaction.

For example, consider a <file:inbound-channel-adapter/> and an Integration application that reads a file when it appears in a directory, and updates a database. This…

Introduction

MongoDb Outbound Channel Adapter

You can see the simplest configuration of the MongoDb Channel Adapter below:

<int-mongodb:outbound-channel-adapter id="deafultAdapter"/>

It will be initialized with the default instance of the MongoDbFactory (the default bean name is 'mongoDbFactory') otherwise you can provide its reference via mongodb-factory attribute.

Now you can run the MongoDbOutboundAdapterDemo. After running it open terminal window and start MongoDb CLI

$> mongo

Once in MongoDb CLI type a query:

> db.data.find({})

And you should see the 3 document entries we just created:

{ "_id" : ObjectId("505ff83d03649ed6881d…

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois talking to StateFarm about Spring Projects: MVC, REST, Mobile, and Android. The developers here are code ninjas. Listening to their internal talks over the course of the day has been eye opening, to say the least. Don't miss the Spring, Groovy and Grails event of the year in Washington, DC: SpringOne2GX. If you haven't already registered, now's the time! Oh, and don't forget, if you're in the United States, today is national cheeseburger day! So... bon appetit!

<LI> Chris Beams has announced the availability of <a href ="http://www.springsource.org/node/3654">Spring Framework 3.2 M2</a>, which features many new features including improved <CODE>TestContext</CODE> support, Spring MVC improvements, asynchronous <CODE>@Controllers</CODE>, and lots of bug-fixes and improvements.  </LI>
<LI> This month's SpringSource webinar is coming fast - <a href ="http://www.springsource.org/node/3653"> Spring Security with Rob Winch</a>. Be sure to register now! </LI>
<li> Martin Lippert has announced the availability  of the <a href="http://www.springsource.org…

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! I'm off to Oslo, Norway for the JavaZone conference to talk to people about using Spring Integration and Spring Batch on top of Cloud Foundry. Again, this is a natural use case: Cloud Foundry makes it easy to scale to handle the largest workloads, and Spring Integration and Spring Batch, presumably sitting on top of RabbitMQ, take care of the plumbing and do the heavy lifting of workload distribution across the cluster.

 <P>Wrapping up from last week's Cloud Foundry   Open Tour - India, touring <a href="http://opentour.cloudfoundry…

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring, VMWorld edition! We're at the VMWorld event, talking to developers about Spring and Cloud Foundry. There's been a lot of exciting news coming out of this event, including some interesting updates around vFabric and updates regarding the timelines for Cloud Foundry itself: CloudFoundry.com, the hosted PaaS from VMware, will be GA by end-of-year, and next year will see the availability of a private on-premise Cloud Foundry. Both vFabric and Cloud Foundry are ideal environments for your Spring applications, and it's nice to see these platforms evolve.

1. Oliver Gierke has announced that the Spring Data Release Train has reached the station! This release is an umbrella release of several projects that provides uniformity across the various modules.

   	This release includes Spring Data Commons 1.4.0.RC1, Spring Data JPA 1.2.0.RC1, 
   	Spring Data MongoDB 1.1.0.RC1, Spring Data Neo4j 2.1.0.RC3 and Spring Data Gemfire 1.2.0.RC1.
   	
   	
   	  </LI>
   <LI> Gunnar Hillert has a nice blog introducing how to <a href = "http://blog.springsource.org/2012/08/23/spring-integration-extensions/">bootstrap custom Spring Integration adapter development.</a>
   	 
   	 </LI>
   
   <LI>  Gary Russel has announced that the latest iteration of  <a href  = "http://www.springsource.org/node/3639">Spring Integration, 2.2.0M4, is now available</a>.  Gary, a very busy man indeed…

I was thrilled to see in a recent survey from zeroturnaround that Spring MVC was voted the most popular web framework for Java.

This framework is very flexible and there are dozens of ways to use it. As with all flexible frameworks that have many options, it is important to discuss common practices.

The project I have created for this blog entry uses features common in many Spring MVC applications. You will find something like this:

In controllers you will find typical Spring MVC features for mapping requests, extracting request data through annotations, data binding, file upload…

On the…

The Spring Integration team proudly announces the availability of the Spring Integration Extensions repository. The main goal for this new GitHub-based repository is to promote a vibrant community of adapter and extension developers, and to encourage a broader segment of the community to contribute to the project. The Spring Integration Extensions project is hosted at:

• https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-integration-extensions

This new repository will give us the flexibility to incorporate new contributions much more rapidly, without having to go through the core Spring Integration framework’s stricter vetting process. Since each community contributed extension is a separate project in the Spring Integration Extensions repository, it will have its own release life-cycle independent from the one that governs the core Spring Integration framework. As a result, this will allow for more frequent releases.

Over time, we expect that some of the lesser used Spring Integration modules may transition into the Extensions repository. On the other hand, for some extension modules, the Spring Integration Extensions project may also serve as an incubator, whereby they may eventually be incorporated into the core Spring Integration framework.

Thanks to several community contributions, the new repository already provides several adapters such as the XQuery Adapter (incl. support for XPath 2.0) and the SMB Adapter. Several adapters around Amazon Web Services (AWS) will be added in the coming weeks (Amazon S3, Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS). Furthermore, we are providing an early version of a Print Adapter and we are also working on an adapter providing WebSocket support using Atmosphere.

How Can I Become a Contributor?

If you have an idea regarding new extensions and/or adapters, please feel free to file a JIRA ticket. If you have already created an extension module and you want to contribute code, please fork the Spring Integration Extensions repository, add your module and issue a pull request. Before we can merge your code, though, you have to fill out the Contributor License Agreement. Once submitted, we and/or other community members will review your pull request and merge it. For much more detailed information, please take a closer look at the Contributor Guidelines for the Spring Integration Extensions project.

Creating New Spring Integration Extension Modules

One of the more popular extension types are Spring Integration Adapters. In order to simplify the process of writing custom adapters for Spring Integration, we now provide an Adapter Template for SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) 3.0.0. This template will make it very easy for contributors to build out new adapters quickly, while still ensuring consistency with those provided in the core Spring Integration framework (package structure, naming conventions, namespace handlers/parsers, etc).

The Spring Integration Adapter Template, which is part of the Spring Integration Templates project, creates a fully functional Spring Integration Module, and the template will create the following commonly used components:

• Inbound Channel Adapter
• Outbound Channel Adapter
• Outbound Gateway

The template will not only create the core Java classes and some basic unit tests, but it will also provide XML Namespace support, which includes the XML Schema and the associated parser classes. Even if you create other types of components, this template should still give you valuable insights into how to develop those. For more information on using STS Templates for Spring Integration, please see the following blog posting:

• Creating Spring Integration Projects Using STS.

The created adapter project will use Gradle as its build tool, and it closely follows the build tasks as defined for Spring Integration:

Build the Adapter project

    $ ./gradlew build

Install the Adapter project to your local Maven repository

    $ ./gradlew install

Generate the JavaDoc

    $ ./gradlew api

Generate metrics using Sonar

    $ ./gradlew sonar

Build the complete distribution

    $ ./gradlew dist

For more information please see How to Create New Components on the Spring Integration Extensions Wiki.

Further Resources

• JIRA
• Forums
• Build Server
• Metrics

Spring Integration GitHub Repositories

For completeness, here is a list of all Spring Integration relevant GitHub repositories:

• Spring Integration
• Spring Integration Extensions
• Spring Integration Samples
• Spring Integration Templates
• Spring Integration Dsl Groovy
• Spring Integration Dsl Scala