This announcement post is a guest contribution by the developers of the Neo4j team that worked closely with SpringSource's Spring Data team to provide the Spring Data Graph integration library.

For a friendly introduction to Spring Data Graph we’re hosting a free webinar with VMware presented by Neo Technology’s CEO Emil Eifrem on April 20 at two convenient times for the Americas and Europe. [Update: The webinar video is now available on youtube in the SpringSourceDev channel.]

Now that Spring is in the air, the Neo4j and Spring Data teams are happy that almost a year’s worth of work has produced our 1.0 version of the Spring Data Graph library. The Spring Data project aims to bring the convenient programming model of the Spring Framework to NOSQL databases. Spring Data Graph supports graph databases…

By now you probably heard about Cloud Foundry, the open PaaS from VMware that was announced yesterday; if not make sure to check out the recording of the webcast. Eventually you have already read earlier blog posts introducing the Spring support for Cloud Foundry, the add-on for Spring Roo and the Grails plug-in.

With this post I’d like to introduce the Eclipse-based support for Cloud Foundry that lets you manage your cloud deployments, including configuration of Services and service bindings, application scaling, access to file resources and much more.

Installing the Cloud Foundry for Eclipse and STS

Installing through the STS Extension Install

Within STS select “Help > Dashboard…

Today, we have exciting news for developers: the launch of Cloud Foundry: an open source “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) from VMware allowing easy deployment of applications written using Spring, Rails and other modern frameworks. Cloud Foundry breaks new ground in PaaS through supporting a choice of programming models; a choice of services from VMware and third parties; a choice of clouds for deployment; and being delivered in open source.

Since the creation of Spring, we’ve remained faithful to a few core values: notably, Productivity and Portability. Today, these proven values extend beyond Spring and Java into VMware’s broader cloud computing strategy. Spring makes developers more productive by reducing time spent away from business logic; Cloud Foundry eliminates time spent installing and configuring infrastructure such as application servers and JVMs. Spring facilitates portability between deployment destinations; Cloud Foundry is both a key deployment destination itself and a layer that…

By now, many of you have probably seen the Cloud Foundry webinar and Rod's blog from earlier today. I'd like to provide a quick follow-up that features a "hello-spring" sample application deployed in the cloud. Thanks to Cloud Foundry, there's practically no learning curve at all.

Before we get started, let's consider three goals that have driven Spring from day one:

1. focus on simplicity and productivity to make developers lives easier
2. support innovative technologies in a consistent way
3. ensure portability of applications across deployment environments

Then, consider those same three goals in relation to Cloud Foundry:

1. Simplicity and Productivity: Deploying a Spring application to the cloud is as simple as dragging and dropping within SpringSource Tool Suite, and even when building an application to run in the cloud, developers can take advantage of the productivity gains enabled by Roo and Grails exactly as they normally would.
2. Consistent Innovation: Projects like Spring Social and Spring Data embrace innovative technologies such as Twitter and non-relational data stores that are increasingly popular for cloud-based applications, and they do so in ways that are consistent with the existing Spring platform. Cloud Foundry provides services to support such applications. RabbitMQ will be available as a cloud service soon, so the same applies to applications that rely on RabbitMQ for messaging via Spring AMQP and Spring Integration.
3. Portability: The cloud is first and foremost a new deployment environment, and yet it's easy to create an application that can run in and out of the cloud without even swapping configuration files.

With those goals in mind, we've designed a sample application that provides an introduction to Cloud Foundry for Spring developers. This is the first of many…

Today marks an important day for developers, with the public beta release of Cloud Foundry, VMware’s open source Platform as a Service offering. Rod Johnson’s blog contains a lot of background details about this exciting announcement, and Mark Fisher’s post offers a first look at the service and how easily applications can move between a local environment and the cloud. As both Rod and Mark highlight today’s announcement is about enhancing and ensuring developer productivity.

In support of this new service and platform we are pleased to announce that we have integrated Cloud Foundry support into Spring Roo - Spring’s rapid application development tool for Java developers. Now you can take Roo’s productivity to the cloud and you don’t even have to leave the shell! There are dozens of commands to make it easy to work with Cloud Foundry, and of course you can build a new application and deploy it to Cloud Foundry in just a few minutes. Once you’ve logged in, it’s as simple as using the new “cloud foundry deploy” command and…

A couple of years back, the co-founder of a startup spoke at the London Groovy and Grails User Group. I remember vividly how he said he dreamed of deploying a Grails application with "just one click". With the announcement of the new Cloud Foundry service, his dream is nearly a reality for all Grails users. Now you not only get simple and rapid development with Grails, but also simple and rapid deployment to a cloud hosting provider.

So how do Grails and Cloud Foundry work together? As long time Grails users would expect, we have a plugin for that! To demonstrate how it works I'm going to walk you through deploying a sample application, Pet Clinic, to Cloud Foundry. It's a simple application and you can see it in action on Cloud Foundry…

This year is moving along at a very quick clip!

We've already seen a torrent of new and exciting releases for Spring users and just today news of perhaps the most exciting thing yet went out. If you didn't get it because you aren't, for example, a registered SpringSource Tool Suite user, then here are the salient bits:

Next Tuesday - April 12th - VMware is hosting a webinar - "Spring into the cloud!" - with the provocative explanation, "Spring has already simplified enterprise Java development. Next up is cloud development."

The webinar will be presented for both Europe and North America timezones. See this page for details, and don't…

Designing a good routing topology for a highly-scalable system can be like mapping a graph. Many things need to be considered, for instance the problem, constraints of the environment, those of the messaging implementation, and performance strategies. What we often run up against is a lack of flexibility and expressivity in fitting routing to our needs. Here is where RabbitMQ stands out.

Basic Concepts

• Exchange The entity within the server which receives messages from producer applications and optionally routes these to message queues within the server
• Exchange type The algorithm and implementation of a particular model of exchange. In contrast to the "exchange instance", which is the entity that receives and routes messages within the server
• Message queue A named entity that holds messages and forwards them to consumer applications
• Binding An entity that creates a relationship between a message queue and an exchange
• Routing key A virtual address that an exchange may use to decide how to route a specific message

api.agents.agent-{id}.operations.{operationName}

In more complex cases the routing key may be combined with routing on message header fields and/or its content. An exchange examines a message's properties, header fields, body content, and possibly data from other sources, then decides how to route the message. A binding pattern derived from the above routing key idea might look like api.agents..operations. where we bind exchange E1 to queue Q1 with binding pattern api.agents..operations. so that any messages sent to E1 route to Q1…

Well, that was a good week! Lots of good stuff coming out of both the community and of course out of SpringSource itself.

This week reminded I was reminded that the Spring framework usually has something that could go a long way in simplifying or alleviating a challenge at hand if you just know where to look. Often, I'll check the SpringSource Forums, the JIRA instance, and - if I'm sufficiently convinced it's not already resolved or accounted for in the forums or in JIRA - in the StackOverflow category for Spring. SpringSource engineers try to monitor both the forums and - less ocassionally - the StackOverflow forums, as well. Additionally, I like to learn as I go - it's a "cinch by the inch, hard by the…