Speaker: Greg Turnquist

Spring Boot lets you write apps better than ever. But did you ever think about writing all those support scripts and tools you inevitably need with Boot as well? In this webinar, see how the Spring team has already picked up and run with Spring Boot CLI as a powerful way to manage things like all open issues against the 60+ getting started guides. See how to monitor application logs using a little Spring Integration, Spring WebSocket+STOMP, and other technologies, all with some lightweight Boot+Groovy code.

Learn more about Spring Boot at: http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot

Webinar Resources: https://github.com/gregturn/spring-monitor

https://github.com/gregturn/issue-aggregator

https://github.com/gregturn/drone-aggregator

Spring Data JPA allows manually defining the query to be executed by a repository method using the @Query annotation. Unfortunately parameter binding in JPQL is quite limited only allowing you to set a value and providing some type conversion. The latest Spring Data JPA M1 release of the Evans release train eases this pain by adding support for using SpEL expressions to use dynamically bound parameters within statements in @Query annotations which provides additional flexibility when defining queries manually. In this blog post, I am going to introduce you to the capabilities of this feature.

…

With the recent release of Spring Data's Evans M1 milestone, Spring Data REST now comes with support for ALPS metadata to describe the semantics of the resources exported.

ALPS is a data format for defining simple descriptions of application-level semantics, similar in complexity to HTML micro-formats. It also supports adding its metadata to existing media types. As of version 2.2 M1, Spring Data REST exposes JSON based ALPS resources that can help us navigate its resources. Let's see how!

We can start with a quick example. If you clone the TODO repo and run mvn spring-boot:run, you can…

Dear Spring Community,

we are happy to announce the next major release of our Eclipse-based tooling today: The Spring Tool Suite (STS) 3.6.0 and the Groovy/Grails Tool Suite (GGTS) 3.6.0.

Highlights from this release include:

• based on Eclipse Luna 4.4
• support for Groovy 2.3
• updated to Grails 2.4
• updated to tc Server 2.9.6
• minor improvements to the Gradle tooling
• bugfixes, including fixes for endless build loops and memory leaks

To download the distributions, please go visit:

• Spring Tool Suite: https://spring.io/tools/sts/all
• Groovy/Grails Tool Suite: https://spring.io/tools/ggts/all

Detailed new and noteworthy notes can be found here: STS/GGTS 3.6.0 New & Noteworthy.

NOTE: Both tool suites ship on top of the latest Eclipse Luna 4.4 release as 64bit and 32bit based zip files only. There will be no native installers for STS/GGTS anymore.

From now on, we shift towards a slightly changed release schedule, shipping minor releases more frequently. Therefore 3.6.1 is scheduled to ship on…

We are happy to announce the first milestone of the Spring Data Release train Evans.

• Spring Data Commons 1.9 M1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data JPA 1.7 M1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data MongoDB 1.6 M1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Neo4j 3.2 M1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Solr 1.3 M1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Couchbase 1.2 M1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Cassandra 1.1 M1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Elasticsearch 1.1 M1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - …

Today we are pleased to announce the release of Spring Batch 3.0.1, Spring Batch Admin 1.3.0.RC1, and introduce the Spring Batch Extensions project. These releases in addition to the Spring Batch Extensions project address a number of improvements and issues.

Spring Batch 3.0.1

This release of Spring Batch consists mainly of bug fixes, however, one new feature was added: ScriptItemProcessor. This ItemProcessor implementation provides the ability to use an external or inline script to provide the logic of your processor. An example of using Groovy inline would look something like this:

@Bean
public ScriptItemProcessor processor() {
    ScriptItemProcessor<String, Object> scriptItemProcessor = new ScriptItemProcessor<String, Object>();

    scriptItemProcessor.setScriptSource("item.toUpperCase();", "groovy");
    scriptItemProcessor.afterPropertiesSet();

    return scriptItemProcessor;
}

This ItemProcessor allows full support of all JSR-223 scripting options.

Spring Batch Admin 1.3.0.RC1

Spring Batch Admin 1.3.0.RC1 addresses a number of issues as well as updated it to be used with the Spring Batch 2.2.x version of the job repository and beyond. In addition to the issues addressed, we also completed a number of dependency updates to bring the project up to date from that perspective.

To support the users of Spring Batch 2.2.x, this release contains the Spring Batch Integration module and still uses Spring Integration 3. However, Spring Batch 3.0 saw us move this module to Spring Batch and so this will be the last release of Spring Batch Admin that contains this module. Going forward, users will be expected to use the version included within Spring Batch.

Spring Batch Extensions

Finally, we are happy to announce a new repository for Spring Batch, Spring Batch Extensions. This project provides a home for community contributed modules akin to Spring Integration Extensions. With this announcement, we have our first contribution, the spring-batch-elasticsearch module. This module provides an ItemReader and an ItemWriter for interacting with Elasticsearch. You can find information about this module and other contributions on Github. We look forward to future contributions from the community to help expand the available use cases for Spring Batch.

Please share your feedback on Stack Overflow, social media, and in person at SpringOne2GX!

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! I hope our American readers had a pleasant 4th of July, and I hope everybody else had a pleasant Friday!

There is, as usual, a lot to discuss this week so let's get to it!

1. Sleepless Spring Security lead Rob Winch has just announced the first milestone of Spring Session. Spring Session makes it easy to access a session from any environment (i.e. web, messaging infrastructure, etc), support for clustering in a vendor neutral way, plug in strategies for determining the session ID, and easily keep the HttpSession alive when a WebSocket is active. This is really cool! And, in fact, it might solve an issue I faced just last week where I wanted to access the HTTP session from a Web Socket handler!
2. Andy Wilkinson has just announced Spring Boot 1.1.4 release. The new release includes many bug-fixes and small new features, including support for the first stable preview release of Tomcat 8.
3. Andy also just announced the first maintenance release to Spring IO which updates versions across the platform to include Spring AMQP 1.3.5, Spring Boot 1.1.4, Spring Batch 3.0.1, Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.0.1, and Spring Framework 4.0.6. Nice job, Andy!
4. Thomas Risberg has just announced Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.0.1 which revs the dependency versions, including Hadoop 2.4.1, Spring framework 4.0.6.RELEASE, Spring Batch to 3.0.1.RELEASE, Spring Boot to 1.1.4.RELEASE.
5. Stéphane Nicoll has just announced that Spring framework 4.0.6 is now available. This release includes about 50 bugfixes.
6. Spring Social lead Craig Walls has just announced that Spring Social Facebook 2.0.0.M1 is now available. This release supports the new Facebook v2.0.0 Graph API, which introduces some breaking, obligatory, changes (thanks, Facebook!).
7. Groovy project lead Guillaume LaForge has announced the beta of the new Groovy website and is soliciting feedback from the community at large.
8. From the trenches: Join Casey Doolittle and Phil Dutson on July 15th for a webinar about a crazy project, and how they had to Build a Shopping Cart in 24 Hours using Spring.
9. Check out this upcoming webinar by Michael Plod on why he recommends Spring - learn the technology (and a bit of the business) case! Michael is a great speaker and frequently appears at conferences. Register now for the event on July 22nd.
10. On July 29th, Russ Danner from Crafter software will tell us about Conquering Content-enabled Web and Mobile Applications with Spring and Groovy.
11. Last year, Spring tool ninjas Andy Clement and Martin Lippert did a great talk at SpringOne2GX 2013 introducing the latest and greatest tooling.
12. Last year at SpringOne2GX 2013, Julien Dubois (you might recognise him from JHipster..) did a great talk looking at how to run and performance tune the classic Spring petclinic application.
13. Dr. Dobb's had a nice post looking at the new Spring IO release.
14. InfoQ's Matt Raible also put together a nice look at Spring IO. Check it out!
15. The Literate Java blog has an interesting post on implicit (component-scan-centric) vs. explicit configuration (using XML) in Spring. I'd argue that Java configuration should really be considered as it offers the best of both explicit XML configuration (centralized, easy-to-reason about configuration) and implicit, but type-safe, Java annotation-and-component-scann-centric configuration. Either way, interesting post!
16. Spring Boot is now in Thoughtwork's technology radar under assess.
17. The Codeleak.pl site has a nice look at one of the smaller, but super powerful, features in Spring 4 - CGLIB proxies no longer require a default constructor!
18. I've enjoyed this series of tutorials on using Spring and Angular.js. You might as well. Nice job, Christopher Henkel!
19. The Apprenticeship Notes blog has a nice series of tutorials on how to use Spring MVC, Thymeleaf, and Bootstrap together.
20. The Autoletics blog has a nice, numbers-filled, look at their experience profiling the Reactor project. Interesting stuff! Some of the points are interesting, too. As readers of this roundup know, Reactor is a highly concurrent event-driven IO-ready platform. And, it's ridiculously fast.
21. I wanted to give a hat tip to Paul Snively, who has been using the 1-2 punch combo of the Spring (and Scala) and a third-party integration of Spring MVC for Alfresco to build Alfresco-powered solutions. Nice!
22. Whether you like the new Groovy website or not (although, why wouldn't you?), you'll love the new Groovy 2.3.4 release which just dropped today and includes improvements on static compilation and AST transformations.
23. HornetQ project-lead Clebert Suconic is inviting community feedback about a proposed contribution of HornetQ to the Apache ActiveMQ project. We know that developers in our community know and use both, so perhaps now's a prudent time to feedback if this proposed merger affects you! I personally like the idea. ActiveMQ.next (long codenamed "Apollo") seems like it could use the hug that a HornetQ-contribution could give it. And, of course, Spring Boot supports both ActiveMQ and HornetQ now, so either way, you're set!

I'm pleased to announce the release of Spring Session 1.0.0.M1.

Benefits

This project provides a number of benefits including:

• Accessing a session from any environment (i.e. web, messaging infrastructure, etc)
• In a web environment
  • Support for clustering in a vendor neutral way
  • Pluggable strategy for determining the session id
  • Easily keep the HttpSession alive when a WebSocket is active

Getting Started

Refer to the Quick Start section of the README to learn how to you can use Spring Session in your application.

Feedback Please

If you have feedback, I encourage you to reach out via github issues, via the comments section, or ping me on twitter @rob…

We are pleased to announce that the first maintenance release of Spring IO Platform has been released. It's available from both repo.spring.io and Maven Central.

This release upgrades the versions of a number of the projects in the Platform to pick up their latest maintenance releases:

• Spring AMQP 1.3.5
• Spring Boot 1.1.4
• Spring Batch 3.0.1
• Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.0.1
• Spring Framework 4.0.6

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