Over the past year, we have significantly improved the cache abstraction, with support of JSR-107 (JCache) annotations and a better declarative model to share or externalize common settings. In Spring Boot 1.3, we now offer a comprehensive auto-configuration for it.

In a nutshell, the cache abstraction applies caching to methods, thus reducing the number of executions based on the information available in the cache. The caching logic is applied transparently: the method below will only be invoked if the specified ISBN is not already present in the books cache. Upon calling that method for a missing Book, the caches will be updated transparently so that a further call does not invoke the…

This post is a guest post by community member Tadaya Tsuyukubo (@ttddyy), creator of the Spring Social Slideshare project. Thanks Tadaya! I’d like to see more of these guest posts, so - as usual - don’t hesitate to ping me! -Josh

Spring Social Evernote is one of the community modules in the Spring Social ecosystem. It is a service provider implementation for Evernote. It allows developers to work with the Evernote SDK for Java with idiomatic Spring idioms.

Evernote takes a unique approach for providing their APIs to developers. They have created language specific SDKs based on Thrift serialization format. Dave Engberg, CTO of Evernote, explained the motivations for choosing Thrift in this blog…

I am pleased to announce that Spring Data GemFire now has support for Apache Geode.

What is Apache Geode?

In a nutshell, Apache Geode is the open source core of Pivotal GemFire. Geode was recently accepted into the Apache incubator after being submitted by Pivotal to the Apache Software Foundation as part of the BDS open sourcing effort.

Technically, Apace Geode is an in-memory, distributed database (a.k.a. IMDG) enabling new as well as existing Spring/Java applications to operate at cloud scale with high availability and predictable latency without sacrificing consistency. Applications are able to transact and analyze Big Data in realtime to achieve…

I'm pleased to announce that Spring Boot v1.3.0.M1 is available now from the Spring milestone repository. This release builds on Spring Framework 4.2.0.RC1 and provides a number of improvements and new features over Spring Boot 1.2. Highlights include:

• A new spring-boot-devtools module with support for automatic restart, LiveReload and remote update.
• Extensive caching support for EhCache, Hazelcast, Infinispan, Redis, Guava or any compliant JSR-107 (JCache) implementation. Cache metric information is now also exposed via the actuator (when the underlying technology supports it).
• Improved metrics support, include export and aggregation features and big performance improvements if you're using Java 8.
• Fully executable JARs for Linux based operating systems, including "service" support. Starting a Boot application as a Linux service is now as easy as typing: sudo ln -s /var/myapp/myapp.jar /etc/init.d/myapp…

We are pleased to announce the Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.2 GA release.

The most important changes/enhancements in the Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.2 version are:

• Remove support for running with JDK 6, Java 7 or later is now required
• Improvements to the HDFS writer to support syncable writes and a new timeout option
• Improvements in the HBase support - adding PUT and DELETE to HbaseTemplate
• Add support for Pivotal HD 3.0
• Update Cloudera CDH 5 to use version 5.3.3
• Update Hortonworks HDP 2.2 version to 2.2.4.0
• Update Kite SDK to version 1.0
• Update Spring project versions to the latest

We continue…

As you might have gathered from my Java EE 7 blog post, we are planning for a Spring Framework 5.0 generation with a 2016 availability horizon. We'll be tracking JDK 9's release candidates then since one of our key themes is comprehensive JDK 9 support.

The feature planning for Spring 5 is still in the works. We are going to present a more in-depth plan at SpringOne this year, so stay tuned! Nevertheless, I would like to take this opportunity to reach out to you for feedback about our intended system requirements:

We will definitely raise our minimum to JDK 8+. This is a prerequisite since it…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! What a week! This week I'm in Kansas City for the 6,000+-strong developer conference of a single company's developers and then it's back to New York City for QCon NYC where I'll be talking up building cloud-native applications with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud. If you're in either place be sure to reach out to me and let's talk shop (Spring, and, optionally, in Kansas City, BBQ..)

• Spring co-founder and project lead Juergen Hoeller put together two must-read posts this week: the first looks at Java 8 and Spring 4 adoption. ALSO, much, much, much more importantly: HE MENTIONED THIS WEEK IN SPRING :D #WIN.
• Juergen also posted is one of my favorite in years, a brutally honest look at the Java EE 7 landscape and the depressing lack of (big-vendor) supported implementations options for production-supported Java EE containers. You know, the man has a point..
• The amazing Dr. Pollack (see above!) announced Spring XD 1.2 RC1. The new release is packed with lots of new stuff including an Apache Ambari plugin to package and deploy Spring XD into production, new analytics, new features and performance improvements for the Apache Kafka support, improved HA configuration for RabbitMQ, Sqoop metastore support, and a lot…

For security reasons, browsers prohibit AJAX calls to resources residing outside the current origin. For example, as you're checking your bank account in one tab, you could have the evil.com website in another tab. The scripts from evil.com shouldn’t be able to make AJAX requests to your bank API (withdrawing money from your account!) using your credentials.

Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) is a W3C specification implemented by most browsers that allows you to specify in a flexible way what kind of cross domain requests are authorized, instead of using some less secured and less powerful…

Note that there's a follow-up blog post about Spring 5 system requirements. You might want to start there if you're primarily interested in the Spring 5 planning process.

In our quest for Java EE integration, we're trying to actively embrace the latest generation of specifications such as JPA, Bean Validation and of course the Servlet and JMS APIs. As of Spring 4, we're supporting the Java EE 6 and 7 level of specifications side by side. We would like to raise it to the EE 7+ level (JPA 2.1, Bean Validation 1.1, and in particular Servlet 3.1 and JMS 2.0) soon but are facing a fundamental problem: the lack of EE 7 platform…