Dear Spring Developers and Graphistas,

We're happy to present you with the release of Spring Data Neo4j 2.0 as a small Christmas gift from our side. Spring Data Neo4j is based on Neo4j 1.6.M02.

The major feature of this release is the addition of a simple mapping mode (spring-data-neo4j). Just annotate your POJOs and use a GraphRepository for the usual CRUD and advanced query operations.

For graph-attached POJOs and high performance use-cases, you can employ the advanced mapping mode (spring-data-neo4j-aspects), which leverages AspectJ to enhance your domain class.

Both mapping modes use the same underlying code, which is now based on the Spring Data Commons mapping infrastructure.

We improved the Cypher graph query language support by supporting new Cypher features, adding queries derived from finder-methods to the repositories and extended the result handling conversions to include projections to mapping-interfaces, Pages and more.

Besides also adding preliminary geospatial support provided by the Neo4j-spatial project, we also support new, type-safe Cypher-DSL which can also be used in conjunction with Query-DSL.

The example project are now included with the main source tree so that they are always up-to-date. The cineasts tutorial app is also included in the examples in 3 versions (simple mapping, advanced mapping, REST).

Thanks to the recent public availability of the Neo4j Add-On on Heroku, we included a chapter on how to deploy a Spring Data Neo4j application into the Heroku cloud. You’ll also find an accompanying example application called “todos” that is ready for deployment.

Special Thanks to James and Werner from Junisphere for all the code contributions and fixes.

In the last few weeks we got a lot more feedback on the Spring Forums, on JIRA and on the Neo4j Mailing list. We used your help to remove bugs, improve behaviour and documentation. Thanks a lot to everyone who reported issues and contributed insights.

To learn more about Spring Data Neo4j make sure to watch the introductory webinar by the project lead Michael Hunger and have a look at the extensive guide book. The detailed presentation from the Spring One conference is available on InfoQ.

And then please get your hands dirty and include Spring Data Neo4j in your holiday project which you could use to look at your domain with a fresh perspective.

Happy Holidays!
The Spring-Data and Neo4j Team

Project resources:
Downloads | Reference Card | JavaDocs | Spring Data Graph Guide Book | Changelog | GitHub Repository

Dear Spring Community,

to go on with SpringSource Christmas presents I'd like to announce the availability of Spring Data Mongo 1.0 GA. The release marks the end of a long road to the first step of developing sophisticated data access using a MongoDB datastore. The overall feature set includes:

• MongoTemplate to simplify performing common Mongo operations, including map-reduce and geo spatial queries
• Spring namespace to configure MongoDB instances, replica sets and JMX monitoring
• MongoConverter for domain class mapping and persistence
• Spring Data repositories support
• MongoDB Log4j appender
• Cross-store persistance - support for JPA Entities with fields transparently persisted/retrieved using MongoDB
• Java based Query, Criteria, and Update DSLs
• QueryDSL integration

Part of that release is the release of Spring Data Commons 1.2 GA which contains most of the core functionality of the high-level functionality such as entity mapping and repository abstraction. Note that we will remove the Spring Data Document repository from GitHub as we moved it to the Spring Data…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce the release of Spring Social 1.0.1!

Spring Social is an extension of the Spring Framework that enables you to connect your Java applications to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as Facebook and Twitter.

In addition to the core Spring Social project, Spring Social Twitter 1.0.1 and Spring Social Facebook 1.0.1 are also now available. Within these releases are fixes for bugs found since 1.0.0 and a handful of minor enhancements. Refer to the changelogs (Core | Facebook | Twitter) for more details.

We're also excited to announce that Spring Social LinkedIn 1.0.0.M4 is now available and includes a more complete API binding. We are looking forward to your feedback as we bring Spring Social LinkedIn closer to a 1.0.0 GA release. (Thanks to Robert Drysdale for contributing much of the LinkedIn API binding code!)

To get the software, download the release distribution (Core | Facebook | Twitter) or simply add the maven artifacts to your project. To see it live, try out the quickstart and fire up the samples. Supplement as you go with information from the reference manual.

Spring Social requires Spring Framework 3.0.5 or > to run. We recommend Spring 3.1 for new applications to take advantage of the latest advances in the core framework. See the reference manual for a full description of dependencies.

VMware's vFabric SQLFire became GA today. It is a memory-optimized distributed SQL database delivering dynamic scalability and high performance for data-intensive modern applications. SQLFire provides developers with a simple SQL interface and Spring developers can connect their application easily using plain JDBC.

• The SQLFire blog by Jags Ramnaryan provides an excellent introduction to the problems that this product helps to solve.
• Jags also provides a great video Introduction to SQLFire on YouTube.
• There is a great step by step tutorial to get you started with SQLFire.
• Interested developers can always ask questions in the SQLFire community discussion forum.

So if you are looking for a high performance, dynamically scaling data solution that has simple SQL access, be sure to download SQLFire and give it a try.

Dear Spring Community, I am pleased to announce the very first GA release of the Spring Data Redis 1.0 project is now available!

Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog

The Spring Data Redis features include:

• Connection package as low-level abstraction across multiple drivers
• Configuration support for Redis Jedis, JRedis and RJC drivers/connectors
• Exception translation to Spring's portable Data Access exception hierarchy for Redis driver exception
• Generified RedisTemplate for exception translation and serialization support
• Jdk, JSON and Spring Object/XML mapping object and hash serializers
• Spring 3.1 cache abstraction implementation for Redis
• Pub-Sub support (such as a MessageListenerContainer for message-driven POJOs)
• Sorting and Pipelining functionality
• Dedicated support for SORT, SORT/GET pattern and returned bulk values
• Atomic counters and JDK Collection implementations on top of Redis

See Spring Data Redis in action through the live RetwisJ sample, a Twitter-clone (deployed in CloudFoundry) based entirely on Redis that showcases the various features of Spring Data Redis.

Additionally, learn about Redis and Spring Data Redis in a dedicated webinar by Salvatore Sanfilippo (Redis author) and Costin Leau (Spring Data Redis lead):

We look forward to your feedback on the forum or in the issue tracker…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce the GA release of Spring GemFire 1.1 project is now available! The Spring GemFire project aims to make it easier to build Spring-powered highly scalable applications using GemFire as distributed data management platform.

Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog

The 1.1 release updates include:

• Aligned Maven naming to Spring Data conventions (new ids are 'org.springframework.data'/'spring-data-gemfire')
• Introduced PDX attributes on cache and client-cache namespace
• Upgraded to Spring Framework 3.1 GA
• Dedicated support for indecies
• Improved region creation
• Dedicated support for Continuous Query (Message Driven POJOs for GemFire)
• Extensive client cache support
• Namespace support for region expiration
• Native support for the upcoming GemFire 6.6
• CacheServer support
• GemFire implementation for Spring 3.1 cache abstraction
• Support for queries with variable parameters

To learn more about the project, visit the Spring GemFire homepage.

Download it now: Spring GemFire for Java | Spring GemFire for .NET

We look forward to your feedback!

P.S. Please use maven.springframework.org/release while Maven…

Dear Spring Community,

I'm pleased to announce that we just released the first milestone build for the next release of the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS).

Highlights from this milestone towards 2.9.0:

• General - update to tc Server 2.6.2
• Spring - support for Spring Integration 2.1
• Grails - Grails 2.0 supported
• Grails - content assist improvements for 'where' queries and 'named' queries
• Grails - DSL support for unit/integration tests
• Grails - improved Grails aware refactoring
• Groovy - Groovy 1.8.4 support
• Groovy - improvements to parser recovery (leading to better code assist)
• Groovy - ability to suppress DGMs in code assist proposals
• Groovy - content assist for named argument constructor calls
• Groovy - quick fixes and quick assists added (e.g. add unimplemented methods)
• Gradle - new 'tasks' view

More details can be found in the New and Noteworthy for 2.9.0.M1 document. Detailed installation instructions are also available, please look at the installation from the milestone update sites.

As always downloads are available from the STS download page, check "Other Downloads".

2.9.0.M2 is planned for late January 2012, followed by the 2.9.0 GA in early March 2012.

Dear Spring Community,

I am pleased to announce that Spring Data MongoDB 1.0 RC1 is now available!

The primary goal of the Spring Data project is to provide a familiar and consistent Spring-based programming model for new datastores while retaining store-specific features and capabilities. The Spring Data MongoDB project provides integration with the MongoDB document database. Key functional areas are a POJO centric model for interacting with a MongoDB DBCollection and easily writing a Repository style data access layer.

This is primarily a bug fix release as we move quickly to GA but a few…

We're pleased to an announce the GA release of Spring Security 3.1

The release is available from the Spring Community Downloads area and jars are available from Maven central repository. See the project website for more information.

There's a high level summary of changes in the What's New? section of the reference manual and a full list of changes can be found in the issue tracker.

Download | Reference Manual | FAQ