So What Does It Take to Operate at China Scale?

The challenges inherent to building enterprise applications that meet China-scale demand are unparalleled. One exemplary Chinese organization using Spring heavily to solve very unique challenges is the Alibaba group. Alibaba is itself an online auction site, like eBay in the west. The Alibaba group in turn owns a few other online service companies, like Alipay (a secure transaction processor, like PayPal in the west), TaoBao (a comparison shopping engine, like Shopzilla in the west), and TMall (an e-tailer, exposing the catalogues of merchants, like Amazon in the west).

From the InfoQ article, "on 11 November, 2012 (the Double Sticks promotion day), Tmall and Taobao witnessed 147 million user visits, purchases of 30 million people and nearly 100 million paid orders. At 0:00, more than 10 million users were concurrently online." The "double sticks promotion day" is celebrated as a sort of day to honor the single people out there. People make blind-dates, attend speed-dating events, and - somewhat like cyber monday shopping in the US - look for good deals from merchants. TaoBao reported USD $3 billion dollars for a single 24 hour period…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's been an exciting two weeks for Hadoop content - Hadoop enthusiasts should check last week's post for an HD quality replay of Building Big Data Pipelines with Spring Hadoop from SpringOne 2GX 2012.

1. Costin Leau has announced that Spring for Apache Hadoop 1.0 has gone GA!

   	This marks the end of a year in development from the time of the first betas.  There's a lot in this release. For  more information, check out  the blog. </LI>
   
   <LI>Did you guys hear about yesterday's announcement from <A href="http://www.greenplum.com/blog/topics/hadoop/introducing-pivotal-hd">about Pivotal HD, a Hadoop distribution which performs better than the competition, provides a true SQL interface, and features extra tools</a> (like an admin console and an installation, configuration and management facility) and is bundled with Spring for Apache Hadoop? 
   

   The release was in the news a lot yesterday. Here's a nice post on GigaOm, another on
   CIO , and yet another on CRN and another still on Silicon Angle…

Getting started with Spring Data and Distributed Database Grids

Whoops! Where did my architecture go?

We are happy to announce the first GA release (1.0) for Spring for Apache Hadoop, almost one year to the date from the release of its first milestone release. During that time we have incorporated a great deal of your feedback to drive the road-map, so thanks everyone from the community who have helped! While new features have been added over the year, the goal of Spring for Apache Hadoop remains the same, to simplify the development of Hadoop based applications.

Download it now, or view the maven artifacts here.

Simplified Programming Model & Consistency

What we have observed is that using the standard out of the box tools that come with Hadoop, you an easily end up with Hadoop applications that are poorly structured collection of command line utilities, scripts and pieces of code stiched together. The different origins of the various projects in the Hadoop ecosystem, such as Hive and Pig focusing on declarative usage or Cascading and HBase for a programmatic angle, have led to different approaches to configuration and API designs.

 

Spring for Apache Hadoop provides a consistent programming and configuration…

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Atlanta, GA with a few other SpringSource colleagues talking to developers at the DevNexus Java conference and - tomorrow - speaking at the Atlanta Spring User Group. This show is bigger and better than ever this year! I love the energy and community here.

If you're in Atlanta, GA, drop by the eHire labs (see the link above for the address) tomorrow night for the Spring User Group and we'll talk about REST, Spring MVC, Spring for Android, Spring Mobile, and more! I look forward to seeing you.

As usual, though, we've got a lot to cover, so let's get to it!

1. The Spring Data release train "Arora" is now avialable, a synchronized, tested release of all Spring Data sub projects - check it out now!
2. Craig Walls has announced that Spring Social 1.1.0.M2 has been released ! The new release incorporates tighter integration with Spring Security and a slew of new features.
3. Jeremy Grelle has announced When.js 1.8.0 which is cujojs's lightweight Promises/A implementation.

<LI>  Gary Russell <a href  = "http://www.springsource.org/node/3813">has announced Spring Integration 3.0.0 M1</a>. 
 There are no major new features in this first milestone, it is mainly refactoring, removing deprecations, etc. Browse the documentation 'what's new' and the release notes for more information.

		 

4. Register now to talk with Sam Brannan and Rossen Stoyanchev on Feb 21st in the Webinar: Testing Web Applications with Spring 3.2
5. New replays from SpringOne2012 - talks from the Data and Integration track talks starting to hit YouTube. Check out Gary Russell's Monitoring and Managing Spring Integration Part 2, and Hadoop / Big Data enthusiasts shouldn't miss Costin's talk How to build Big Data Pipelines for Hadoop using OSS.
6. As a bonus session this week, we've also released Spring Data REST: Easily export JPA entities directly to the web.
7. Krishna's blog has a nice post on using CAS (single signon using Jasig) with Spring Security.
8. Sergei Sizov has put together a nice post on using Spring Security and HTTP Basic authentication.
9. The Lucky Ryan blog has a very nice post introducing HDIV - which can be used to prevent cross site request forgery (CSRF), remove the ability to alter non-editable data (hidden fields, params…) and even has options to limit characters globally across form fields - and explaining how to use HDIV with Spring MVC.
10. Your remoting layer (the layer that's exposed over the network) might simply surface the domain model objects from your services layer. Often, however, the object sent across the wire is a slightly different version of the data used by the service. Perhaps fields are omitted because they contain too much data. Perhaps extra fields are added to communicate metadata about the service itself. Perhaps you simply want to flatten two different types into a single object for ease-of-transport. Whatever the reason, the common pattern (or anti-pattern) to handling this is a DTO (data transfer object). We had these before with EJBs and DCOM and CORBA. Now we have them with REST. If you find you have to have DTOs, the jtransfo library introduced in this post seems like it might be helpful in reducing the tedious adapters from DTO to domain object. The post explains how to use JTransfo to automatically handle adapting domain objects to DTOs.
11. The Fahd.blog blog has a nice introduction to Spring Batch's RetryTemplate. This is a very powerful component of Spring Batch that doesn't get enough love, so I am glad to see this post!
12. The Learn and Shine blog has a nice post introducing how to use Spring MVC to render XSLT views.
13. The Java Ninja Chronicles By Norris Shelton, Jr blog has a very concise post on how he took the first steps in using Spring's Java configuration style to make short work of loading properties from an exotic source.

How to build Big Data Pipelines for Hadoop using OSS

We are pleased to announce that Spring Integration 3.0.0.M1 is now available. There are no major new features in this first milestone, it is mainly refactoring, removing deprecations, etc. Browse the documentation 'what's new' and the release notes for more information.

We are happy to see more community contributors and are continuing our efforts to promote that growing trend, both in the core project and the extensions respository.

• Release notes are available here.
• Reference Documentation is here.
• Artifacts are available in the SpringSource Milestone repo and the community download page.

More information is available on the project's home page.

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce the release of when.js 1.8.0.

When.js is cujojs’s lightweight Promises/A and when() implementation, derived from the async core of wire.js, cujojs’s IOC Container. It also provides several other useful Promise-related concepts, such as joining multiple promises, mapping and reducing collections of promises, and timed promises.

Among other things, this release includes an extensive set of adapters for working with existing callback-based APIs, including node-style async APIs, allowing you to effectively convert them into promise-aware functions. In addition, most of the new features in this release are community contributions, which is awesome. Keep it coming!

Some specific highlights include:

• Adapters for promisifying existing callback-based code.
• Mechanisms for generating and processing unbounded/infinite lists
• Promise-based periodic polling utility.

Check out the changelog for more info and direct links to docs for all the new goodies.

If you're still wondering what this cujojs thing is all about, be sure to check out Brian Cavalier and John Hann's "IOC + JavaScript" talk from SpringOne 2012.

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce the second milestone release of Spring Social 1.1.0!

Spring Social is an extension of the Spring Framework that enables you to connect your Java applications to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as Facebook and Twitter.

Along with Spring Social 1.1.0, we are also releasing second milestones for Spring Social Facebook 1.1.0 and Spring Social Twitter 1.1.0.

The main theme of milestone 2 is tighter integration with Spring Security, including a new SocialAuthenticationFilter to achieve sign-in-with-provider capability directly within the Spring Security filter chain.

In addition to Spring Security integration, these milestone releases also include:

• Support for non-standard parameters in the OAuth authorization flows.
• Interceptor capability in ProviderSignInController's flow to allow for custom behavior in authentication flow.
• Sign-in capability for Facebook Canvas applications, including a new spring-social-canvas sample to showcase the use of CanvasSignInController.
• Support for paging in the Facebook API binding with "since" and "until" parameters.
• Advanced search capabilities in the Twitter API binding.
• Support for ticker symbol pseudo-entity in Twitter statuses.

These milestone releases also contain several smaller improvements and bug fixes.

To get the software, download the release distribution (Core | Facebook | Twitter).

As always, the Spring Social community has been awesome at providing feedback and contributing pull requests to make this release possible. Significant contributions in this release came from Stefan Fussenegger, who contributed much of the Spring Security integration code and Yuan Ji who provided feedback and refactoring help in that same set of code. Also, it seems that the Spring Social community has taken a keen interest in using Spring Social to build Facebook Canvas apps, which led to the creation of CanvasSignInController.

If you'd like to follow along or contribute, we encourage you to participate in the Spring Social Forum, report bugs or suggest enhancements, or to fork the code and contribute back via pull requests.