In a press release today, SpringSource and VMware announced that the Spring 3.1 Release Train is complete. Spring Integration, Spring Security, Spring Batch, Spring Data, Spring Mobile and Spring for Android all now support Spring 3.1, making it easier and faster for enterprise developers to build the next generation of enterprise applications.

The press release also highlighted important findings from Evans Data Research regarding the growing popularity and benefits of using Spring. More than two thirds of Java developers are either using Spring today or plan to do so within the next two years and those that do use Spring are 50% more productive.

SpringSource would like to thank all of the amazing community members that made this release possible. Community contributions form an important part of many of the projects and all the users that experimented with milestone and release candidate versions help substantially in making sure that Spring technology is high quality and production ready. Work is already underway on many other exciting projects like the recently announced Spring for Apache Hadoop project. Community members are invited to attend the upcoming SpringOne on the Road events to meet the Spring experts and learn about the latest features available with Spring.

Dear Spring Community,

We're pleased to announce the new release 2.9.0 of the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). Some highlights from this release:

• ships now with just released Eclipse Indigo SR2 (3.7.2)
• updated to tc Server 2.6.3, Spring Roo 1.2.1, and Grails 2.0.1
• now includes an AspectJ 1.7.0 based AJDT
• support for Spring Integration 2.1
• support for Grails 2.0
• improved Gradle integration

More details on new features and bug fixes can be found in the New and Noteworthy document. Detailed installation instructions are also available. As always downloads are available from the STS download page.

Looking ahead, STS 3.0.0 is planned for July 2012 and will be based on Eclipse Juno (4.2).

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the first release candidate of the Spring for Android project is now available!

Spring for Android supports usage of the Spring Framework in a Android environment. The 1.0.0.RC1 release focuses on updating support for the latest Spring Social release in native Android applications, as well as providing enhancements to Rest Template. This includes:

• Support for Spring Social 1.0.2.RELEASE, and Spring Security 3.1.0.RELEASE through the Spring for Android Auth module, which includes a SQLite datastore for persisting OAuth API connections.
• Updated RestTemplate support, now at the level of Spring Framework 3.1.0.RELEASE.
• Added support for Basic Authentication.
• Added AssetResource for accessing static resources stored in the assets directory of an Android project.
• Removed automatic loading of GsonHttpMessageConverter due to incompatibilities with preinstalled versions of Gson on some devices.
• Improved gzip support in RestTemplate.
• Now defaulting to standard J2SE facilities (HttpURLConnection) in Gingerbread and newer, as recommended by Google.
• Disabled connection reuse on Eclair and older versions when using HttpURLConnection, because of a defect in connection pooling on those versions of Android.
• Added several additional bug fixes and improvements.

Spring for Android is supported in Android version 2.1 (API Level 7) and higher.

To get the software, download the release distribution, or simply add the maven artifacts to your project. To see the features live, check out the spring-android-showcase (updated for 1.0.0.RC1).

Dear Spring-NOSQL Community,

Since the last release of Spring Data - Neo4j we worked on a number of issues that you raised as important improvements and extensions.

Thanks to Mark Spitzler, Oliver Gierke, Rajaram Ganeshan, Laurent Pireyn for their contributions and all the other community members for the feedback and discussions.

We want to encourage you to give it a try, especially the new things and send us your feedback.

We are aware of the of issues that are still open and want to address them by the 2.1 release which is planned for the end of March - aligned with Neo4j 1.7.

If you have any questions or suggestions don't hesitate to ask on the Spring Forums, the Neo4j Google Group or by raising an issue in JIRA…

Dear Spring Community, I am pleased to announce the release of Spring for Apache Hadoop 1.0 M1:

Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog

The Spring for Apache Hadoop features include support for:

• Apache Hadoop configuration
• MapReduce, Streaming Jobs and Tool
• HBase configuration
• Hive server and thrift client
• Pig configuration
• Embedded API for Apache Hadoop FsShell and DistCp
• JSR-223/javax.scripting for HDFS interaction
• Spring Batch tasklets for vanilla Apache Hadoop, Hive, Pig

For a quick introduction to Spring for Apache Hadoop, see this blog entry or the reference documentation.

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

Dear Spring Community,

We are happy to announce that the first release candidate of Spring Social LinkedIn is now available!

Thanks to community contributions, the Spring Social LinkedIn project now has a complete API binding in addition to connection support through Spring Social's service provider connection framework.

To get Spring Social LinkedIn, download the release distribution or simply add the Maven artifacts to your project.

As we push toward a GA release, we would like to hear what you think of the RC1 release. Give feedback in the forum or, if you have any suggestions or find any bugs, please post them in the issue tracker.

The first maintenance release in the Spring 3.1.x line is now available via Maven Central, the SpringSource repository, or for direct download from our community download page. This release includes many important bugfixes and minor improvements and is a recommended upgrade.

Cheers!

Download | Documentation | Javadoc API | Change Log | JIRA

On the way to Spring IO conference I'd like to announce the availability of Spring Data MongoDB 1.0.1. It's mainly a bug fix release covering a few glitches found in the first major release. We've fixed some issues in entity mapping, query execution and added a converter for UUIDs out of the box.

Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog

The release is available from our Maven repository and from Maven Central as well. To learn more about the project, visit the Spring Data MongoDB Page. Looking forward to your feedback on the forum or in the issue tracker.

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the release of Spring Data JPA 1.1.0 RC1 as well as 1.0.3 GA. The release candidate includes a ton of new features and a variety of bug fixes. Here's a brief list of the most important ones:

• Support for locking
• Support for @IdClass in entities
• Support for LessThanEqual and GreaterThanEquals, True/False keywords in query methods
• Added CDI integration for repositories
• Improved parameter binding for derived queries for null values

The CDI integration was contributed by Dirk Mahler of Buschmais to a large degree. For a full list of changes see the changelog. Quite a few of the bugs fixed were back ported so we definitely recommend to upgrade to 1.0.3 as well as playing with the release candidate to help improving the final release. The 1.0.3 GA release can be obtained from Maven central while the release candidate is available via our milestone repository at http://repo.springsource.org/libs-milestone…