On behalf of the team I am pleased to announce the second release candidate of Spring Framework 4.1 is now available from our milestone repository. This release includes over 70 fixes and improvements.

Spring 4.1 is really coming up soon: please try it out and let us know if you run into any issue. We're looking forward to getting in touch via Twitter, StackOverflow or JIRA.

SpringOne 2GX 2014 is around the corner

Book your place at SpringOne in Dallas, TX for Sept 8-11 soon. It's simply the best opportunity to find out first hand all that's going on and to provide direct feedback. There will…

Spring Security 3.2.5 (change log) and 3.1.7 (change log) have been released and are available in Maven Central. Important highlights of this release are:

• This release contains a fix for CVE-2014-3527 which resolves an issue where a malicious CAS Service can impersonate another CAS Service when using proxy tickets.
• This release updates the transitive dependencies of the cas module to cas-client-core which has a fix for CVE-2014-4172. This issue was not in Spring Security itself, but the library in which it depends on.

A special thanks to Scott Battaglia & the rest of the CAS team for…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. We've got a lot of cool stuff happening and, as you might imagine, the entire team is abuzz in preparation for SpringOne2GX 2014, coming in just a few short weeks! If you haven't registered, now's the time to do so!

1. Spring Security lead and all-around sleepless ninja Rob Winch has just announced that Spring MVC Test HtmlUnit 1.0.0.M2 has been released. This is an awesome release if you're trying to unit test real pages with Spring MVC

• Spring Boot 1.1.5 has just been released. The new release mainly addresses a few issues and is a recommended upgrade for all users.
• I really enjoyed this blog, ¿Qué es Spring Framework?, which tries to explain what the fundamental value of Spring is. Largely, the (Spanish language) article explains that Spring handles the lifecycle for objects in a consistent way. It's easy to plug in various frameworks, software, around the edges when the fundamental life-cycle is handled. I would point out that this post uses Spring…

We are happy to announce the first release candidate of the Spring Data release train Evans. We ship the following modules:

• Spring Data Commons 1.9 RC1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data JPA 1.7 RC1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data MongoDB 1.6 RC1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Neo4j 3.2 RC1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Solr 1.3 RC1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Couchbase 1.2 RC1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Cassandra 1.1 RC1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Elasticsearch 1.1 RC1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - …

We are pleased to announce that Spring Boot 1.1.5 has been released and is available from repo.spring.io and Maven Central.

This release addresses a number of issues and is a recommended upgrade for all Spring Boot users. For a complete list of changes please refer to the issue tracker.

Project Page | GitHub | Issues | Documentation

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it.

1. Spring Cloud lead Ramnivas Laddad has written up a nice post that looks at how to extend Spring Cloud to consume other services in a consistent manner.

• I liked Samer Abdelkafi's blog introducing how to use Java configuration with Spring. It's always a good time to review..
• The Pragmatists blog has a detailed look at the sort of (tortured) steps involved in using Spring with the Play! web framework
• Biju Kunjummen put together a great post that looks at how to deploy a Spring Cloud enabled application to Cloud Foundry
• Thys Michels is back at it again, this time with a post on building a ToDo application with Spring MVC and Angular.js
• I am really happy that this link is in this week's roundup, the author -Priyadarshini - did an amazing job! Check out this really thoughtful introduction to using Spring Boot to build a CRUD-capable Spring Boot-based application…

I'm pleased to announce the second milestone release of Spring MVC Test HtmlUnit.

The project’s aim is to provide integration between [Spring MVC Test](Spring MVC Test Framework) and HtmlUnit. This simplifies performing end to end testing when using HTML based views.

Changelog

You can view the complete changelog on github. Below are the highlights of the release:

• The release contains Reference Documentation and Publishes the API Docs
• The artifact name has changed from spring-test-mvc-htmlunit to spring-test-htmlunit See the Updating Dependencies to see how to add Spring MVC Test HtmlUnit as either a Maven or Gradle dependency
• The project name has been changed to Spring MVC Test HtmlUnit in order to better align with Spring MVC Test's name
• Context root of "" is now supported
• Support for external resources has been added. See the javadoc of DelegatingWebConnection for additional details.
• Bug fixes
…

One of the most interesting capabilities of Spring Cloud is its extensibility. You can extend it to support additional clouds, enhance already supported clouds, support new services, new service connectors--all without modifying the Spring Cloud code itself. In this blog, we explore this capability. If you haven’t done so already, please read the first and second blog in this series to acquire sufficient background.

The three axes of extensibility

Spring Cloud provides extensibility along three orthogonal directions. You may extend it in one of these directions and orthogonality ensures that…

On behalf of the Spring XD team, I am very pleased to announce the general availability of Spring XD 1.0! You can download the zip distribution. You can also install on OSX using homebrew and on RHEL/CentOs using yum.

Spring XD's goal is to be your one stop shop for developing and deploying Big Data Applications. Such applications require a wide range of technologies to address different use-cases while interoperating as a cohesive process. The steps in this process include:

• Data collection
• Real-time streaming and analytics
• Data cleansing
• Batch processing (both on and off Hadoop)
• Machine learning and exploratory data analysis
• Visualization and Reporting
• Closed loop analytics between real-time and batch processing
…