The Groovy development team is pleased to announce the release of Groovy 2.3.0!

Groovy 2.3 is the new major release of the Groovy programming language for the JVM, featuring:

• official support for running Groovy on JDK 8
• a new trait keyword to define new units of code for composing behaviors
• new and improved compile-time code transformations like:
  • @TailRecursive: for transforming methods with tail recursion to avoid blowing the stack,
  • @Builder: to easily implement fluent builders, generated by the Groovy compiler itself
  • @Sortable: to transform a class to implement Comparable using the various properties of the class
• a new NIO2 module with Path support
• lightening fast JSON parsing and building as covered in the recent article on InfoQ
• closure parameter type inference…

[callout title=Updated March 31 2015]This blog is outdated and no longer maintained. Please refer to the Test Section of the reference documentation for updated documentation. [/callout]

On Monday I announced the release of Spring Security 4.0.0.M1. This is the first of a three part blog series introducing the Spring Security Testing support. The series outline can be seen below:

• In this post we will discuss how spring-security-test makes method based security testing easier
• Our second post will demonstrate how to use spring-security-test with Spring MVC Test
• Our final post will demonstrate how to use spring-security-test with Spring Test MVC HtmlUnit
…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Los Angeles, speaking to large companies who are looking at building their next-generation architectures on top of Spring and Spring Boot, in particular. Oh, I also go to visit the super cool Pivotal Los Angeles office!

• Spring Data Hadoop ninja Thomas Risberg (who, by the way, was one of the original authors on JdbcTemplate, among his many other claims to fame!) has just announced Spring for Hadoop 2.0.RC3. The new release grows the set of supported Hadoop distributions and includes support for YARN, which you can see in action in some of our Getting Started Guides.
• Spring Integration 4.0 is a major upgrade - the new 4.0 release offers full support for Annotations and Java Configuration + some Spring Boot support! With 4.0, you'll be able to make XML - free integration applications. Join project lead Gary Russell taking you through all the new hotness in the webinar, Spring Integration 4.0, the new frontier, on May 13.
• Spring Framework 4.0.4 is a maintenance release with some minor dependency updates, and is recommended. Update the version and mvn clean install/gradle package now!
• The new Spring Data release, Spring Data Dijkstra RC1 (named for Edsger W. Dijkstra), is finally here, and packed full of awesome features! One of my personal favorites is the ability to return Java 8 Optional values in a repository. I put together an example here. The new release train is huge, and includes a few (historically exclusively community-driven) modules like Spring Data Cassandra, Spring Data Solr, and Spring Data Couchbase. Don't miss it!
• The new 3.5.1 release of the Spring and Groovy/Grails Tool Suites are now available. The new releases are packed with new features, updates and a new baseline so check out the release notes.
• Groovy 2.3 is here! (just go read and download, now!)
• The amazing, and sleepless (I'm sure of it! Just look at the blogs he's released!), Rob Winch just announced the first milestone of Spring Security 4.0.0 featuring testing support.
• Spring HATEOAS 0.11 is now available, and features an API for client-side service traversal called Traverson.
• Spring Data Neo4j lead Michael Hunger and I will be giving a webinar on the new awesome in Spring Data Neo4j 3.0 and Neo4j 2.0 on May 20th.
• Not skipping a beat, Xavier Padró has put together a very nice post on using Spring Integration's Java API.
• Spring framework ninja Stéphane Nicoll has just put up a nice blog post introducing the annotation-driven JMS support in the upcoming Spring framework 4.1.
• Want to learn more about Neo4j and Spring Data Neo4J? There's a nice little tutorial on JavaBeat about Spring Data Neo4j. The English is a little choppy and the code examples are garbled with noise, but I think you should still be able to get the gist of it. If you want a more contemporary, Java-centric alternative, check out these guides on using Spring Data Neo4j and using Spring Data Neo4j with Spring Data REST
• If that's still not enough Neo4j, if you're in the Bay Area, then you might want to checkout the meetup that Spring Data Neo4J lead Michael Hunger (and I) will be holding this Thursday, May 8th!
• My pal Andy Piper and I gave a talk at SpringOne2GX 2013 about running and writing Spring applications on Cloud Foundry. Check it out!
• Scott Frederick and Cornelia Davis introduce how to add custom services and runtimes to Cloud Foundry in this amazing talk from SpringOne2GX 2013.
• Did you check out the new Project Reactor release? The new release is packed with cool stuff (including API improvements, a general-purpose object pool and a lot more!) and it paves the way for Reactor 2.0, which will base its Promise and Streams support on the Reactive Streams proejct. Nice!
• Phil Whelan over on the ActiveState blog has a nice post introducing buildpacks. Buildpacks came from Heroku, but of course you can use them in Cloud Foundry and - as with ActiveState's own Stackato project - they work with projects that are built on Cloud Foundry.

Dear Spring Community,

we are happy to announce a minor maintenance release of our Eclipse-based tooling today: The Spring Tool Suite (STS) 3.5.1 and the Groovy/Grails Tool Suite (GGTS) 3.5.1.

This maintenance release includes a number of bug fixes as well as a few updates, including:

• added Java8 support for faceted web projects
• updated Maven Integration for Eclipse to support Java8
• m2e-egit connector now included by default
• Grails updated to 2.3.8
• the Groovy 2.3 compiler now availabe from the dashboard (including early support for Grails 2.4M2 in GGTS)

Both tool suites ship on top of the latest Eclipse Kepler SR2 release.

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 3.5.1 New & Noteworthy.

The next version 3.6.0 is scheduled to arrive in July 2014, shortly after the Eclipse Luna (4.4) release. The first milestone build is scheduled to arrive in late May 2014.

Enjoy!

The Reactor team is pleased to announce that some significant updates to the Reactor framework are now available in the 1.1.0.RELEASE version of Reactor's flexible, asynchronous, fast data framework. This version includes numerous bug fixes and rewrites of key components to make them faster and, maybe more importantly, more efficient in terms of memory usage. Reactor 1.1 now includes the fantastic gs-collections library from Goldman Sachs [1] which provides a very fluent API for dealing with maps and collections of all kinds.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of changes between Reactor 1.0 and 1.…

Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013 in Santa Clara, CA.

Speakers: Cornelia Davis, Scott Frederick

As you find it in the open-source codebase, Cloud Foundry includes a set of prepackaged services (Postgres, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB and RabbitMQ) and a number of application runtimes (Java, Ruby and Node.js). In addition, CloudFoundry.com integrates with a number of external service providers through a services gateway. When you are deploying your own Cloud Foundry you can extend the existing open-source features by adding additional services and runtime support. In fact, you can bring your own runtime to any Cloud Foundry (including CloudFoundry.com) via buildpacks. In this session we will show you how to build and deploy, or broker custom services. We will also introduce you to buildpacks, show you how to create your own, and how to get your apps to use them.

Learn more about using CloudFoundry at: http://www.cloudfoundry.com/use

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Building Spring Applications on Cloud Foundry

Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013 in Santa Clara, CA.

Speaker: Josh Long and Andy Piper

Let's face it, the cloud is here to stay. The cloud's potential can seem sometimes overwhelming, but it doesn't have to if you use Spring. Spring - and the various Spring projects - already embrace the architecture characteristics that make for great, cloud-centric applications in any environment. While Spring works well on any cloud platform, it enjoys a special place in the sun on Cloud Foundry, the open source PaaS from Pivotal. In this talk, join Andy Piper as he introduces how to build Spring applications that work well in the cloud and on Cloud Foundry in particular. We'll cover how to consume services with Spring on Cloud Foundry, how to scale out using RabbitMQ and Spring Integration, how to use standalone processes and RabbitMQ for better batch processing, and discuss strategies for exposing and consuming services in a RESTful service-based cloud architecture. Learn more about spring and Cloud Foundy at http://docs.cloudfoundry.com/docs/using/deploying-apps/jvm/index.html

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I'm pleased to announce the release of Spring Security 4.0.0.M1 available in the Spring Milestone repository. The primary component of this first milestone is testing support. Stay tuned to the spring.io blog for a blog series introducing the test support. If you can't wait to try it out, see the tests in the showcase package which demonstrate some of the highlights.

Reference | Javadoc | Guides

We are happy to announce that Spring for Apache Hadoop version 2.0 RC3 has just been released.

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Now includes support for the latest Hadoop distributions - Pivotal HD 2.0, Cloudera CDH5 and Hortonworks HDP 2.1

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Other than version upgrades, the changes in this version revolve around partitioning support for writing datasets SHDP-327.

The main focus for Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.0 is to add YARN application development support in addition to continue to provide improvements in the HDFS and MapReduce support. You can see many of these new YARN features in use in the YARN samples and in the new Spring IO Guides…