The Spring XD team is pleased to announce that Spring XD Milestone 7 is now available for download.

Highlights of this release

• Transport Data Partitioning: By default, messages are delivered to multiple instances of a stream module in a round-robin manner. However, if a module performs operations such that it can not consume random messages from the stream, then you can partition the stream based on its content so that similar messages are always delivered to the same module instance. For example, if a processing module is performing stateful operations on a per-customer basis, the stream…

Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013 in Santa Clara, CA

Speaker: Jeffery Sologov, ADP

Relying on network reliability and topology are just a few mistakes most engineers make. Common fallacies of distributed computing are one of the most important factors that engineers need to keep in mind when building enterprise software. We will cover each fallacy while showing mistakes most engineers make. We will then cover what coupling truly means and how to tell whether your current project is heading the wrong way. Finally, we will apply aspects of object orientation that held up to this day and learn how to apply them to the new age architectures. Don't learn from your mistakes, learn from others and come away with techniques that you can apply to your current project right away. This is the session that I wish I attended when I was a young lad.

Learn more about Spring Framework at http://projects.spring.io/spring-framework

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Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013 in Santa Clara, CA

Speaker: Gil Tene, Azul

Time is Money. Understanding application responsiveness and latency is critical not only for delivering good application behavior. It is critical for maintaining profitability and containing risk. But good characterization of bad data is useless. When measurements of response time present false or misleading latency information, even the best analysis can lead to wrong operational decisions and poor application experience. In this presentation, Gil Tene (CTO, Azul Systems) discusses some common pitfalls encountered in measuring and characterizing latency. Gil demonstrates and discusses some false assumptions and measurement techniques that lead to dramatically incorrect reporting results, and covers simple ways to sanity check and correct these situations. He discusses the fallacy of using standard deviation measurements, the strongly multi-modal nature of latency, common discontinuities found in most computing platforms, and how back pressure and coordinated data omission issues can literally skew measurement results by orders of magnitude. Gil introduces and demonstrates how simple and recently open sourced tools can be used to improve and gain higher confidence in both latency measurement and reporting.

Learn more about Spring Framework at http://projects.spring.io/spring-framework

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Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. This week's an exciting week! Well, let's be honest. They're all exciting weeks. But in particular, this week's going to make a lot of people happy. Watch the blog and I'll see you back here next week to recap! :)

1. Oh my goodness! Spring Boot 1.1.0.RC1 is now available! The new release maintains the epic with support for Spring Data Elasticsearch, HornetQ, and Spring Social, and a lot more! Grab the latest release, kick the tires, and feedback on Twitter or GitHub.
2. Dr. Mark Pollack has just announced that the latest release of Spring XD, 1.0.0.M7 is now available. The new release provides a lot of great new features. My favorite is the ability to pin data to a certain stream - think of this as correllation using a message's content - so that you can preserve stateful operations. Think of this as a great way to route and divide messages based on a useful business key. There's a great example in the release notes.
3. Azul rockstar Gil Tene gave an amazing talk on reducing latency for SpringOne2gX 2013 that is now available online. Gil is one of our industry's mad scientists. I haven't yet seen this talk, but I will, and I highly recommend that you do too. Azul makes high performance, low latency JVMs both as appliances and as deliverable software. His talks thus stem from a lot of thankless research and development that I'd just as soon spare myself by watching, and learning from, his talks. Go, Gil!
4. June webinars are here! Michael Minella in Spring Batch 3.0.0 on June 10th, and Glenn Renfro in Spring Integration Done Boot-ifully on June 17th.
5. Spring ninja Greg Turnquist has put together a teaser post on using the amazing when.js Promises/A+ implementation in a front-end REST client in advance of his SpringOne2GX 2014 talk. Check out the post and his talk at the conference!
6. Ramnivas Laddad, a Spring ninja, original AspectJ leaders, and architects behind Cloud Foundry, has just posted a very cool look at Spring Cloud, which makes consuming client services from different middle/infrastructure services (a database, a message queue) on various Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaSes) a simple matter of platform-decoupling configuration.
7. The replay of ADP's Jeffery Sologov's talk looking at the pitfalls of building large scale applications is now up! Check it out!
8. ttp://twitter.com/JakubJirutka chimed in to tell us about this epic Spring Expression Language (SpEL)-powered implementation of the Bean Validation API (JSR 303/349). The GitHub offers an interesting point, "it’s especially very useful for cross-field validations that are very complicated with a plain Bean Validation." I love the examples, too:

    
   @SpELAssert(value = "password.equals(passwordVerify)",
           applyIf = "password || passwordVerify",
           message = "{validator.passwords_not_same}")
   public class User {
     private String password;
     private String passwordVerify;
   }
   

   Nice job!

9. A hat tip to the amazing Brian Dussault for finding this: Zuul is a nifty looking application configuration management solution that offers a clean Spring client API.

10. You know what made my day yesterday? A HystrixInvocationHandler. An InvocationHandler is used by the JDK (and Spring's rich proxying subsystem) to create proxies that wrap beans. This InvocationHandler wraps method invocations on a given bean in Netflix's OSS Hystrix project's Command objects. Hystrix Commands wrap functionality and provide/support resiliency patterns. I can't wait to see more of what becomes of Spencer Gibb's Halfpipe project!
11. Our pal David Welch is at it again, this time with an interesting project called Spring Tiered, which aims to simplify even further (and normalize) the development of HATEOAS based services. Interesting...
12. Also, speaking of building (and consuming) resilient services, check out Chris Richardson's fantastic talk from SpringOne2GX 2013 on powerful abstractions for consuming services asynchronously.
13. Also, I put together a post talking about getting started with Maven (and alternatives) and Spring

Spring Boot 1.1.0.RC1 is available now in the Spring repositories. There are some new features and some new documentation:

• Autoconfiguration support for Spring Data Elastic Search, HornetQ messaging, Spring Social

• Support for @IntegrationTest in the Groovy CLI

• Upgrades to Tomcat, Spring Integration, Reactor and Groovy

We are on schedule for a GA release some time in the next 2 weeks, so please try out the RC1 and get feedback onto github as soon as you have time.

Greetings Spring community!

Roy Clarkson and I are presenting a talk at this year's SpringOne 2014 conference called Spring Data REST - Data Meets Hypermedia. We will explore how to quickly bridge the gap between a powerful Spring Data backend and a hypermedia enabled, RESTful front end.

In one part of the talk, we will delve into a javascript front end that lets the user takes pictures and upload them to a website. The website turns around and fetches images from the back end. By itself, this isn't that difficult thanks to the fully loaded RESTful API provided by Spring Data REST.

But fetching multiple images straight up isn't very efficient and is prone to freeze the web browser. Thanks to the CujoJS guys on our team (Brian Cavalier and John Hann), I was able to use the recently released when.js module…

I'm pleased to announce a double bill release of Spring Web Flow 2.4.0 and 2.3.4.

Please refer to the "What's new" section of the reference for an overview of the 2.4.0 release. The 2.3.4 release is minor maintenance release mainly with fixes for issues reported by JSF users.

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the first milestone release 3.6.0.M1 of the Spring Tool Suite (STS) and the Groovy/Grails Tool Suite (GGTS).

Highlights from this milestone build 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.M1 New & Noteworthy.

NOTE: Both tool suites ship on top of the latest Eclipse Luna 4.4 release candidates as 64bit based zip files ONLY. We plan to no longer ship installers and 32bit distributions anymore. Update sites will be available for use with older Eclipse versions and 32bit installations.

We are very keen to hear any feedback on this change.

The 3.6.…

Today we are pleased to announce the release of Spring Batch 3.0. This release of Spring Batch provides support for JSR-352 - we are committed to providing that support, as well as a number of new features for our existing Spring Batch community.

Features in Spring Batch 3.0

The major features for this release include:

• JSR-352 support
• Promotion of Spring Batch Integration into Spring Batch
• Complete overhaul of dependencies
• Support for SQLite
• Job scope
• Removal of "archetypes" in favor of Spring Boot
• Switch from Maven to Gradle for building Spring Batch

JSR-352 Support

Providing one of the most important new features in JEE7, JSR-352 brings standardization of batch processing to the java stack. The Spring team not only provided extensive input into the spec with two team members on the expert group, but Spring Batch served as the inspiration for most of the programming model. Spring Batch 3.0 continues the Spring commitment to JSR-352 by providing the most production tested code base to implement this specification.

It's important to note the differences between JSR-352 and Spring Batch. JSR-352 provides three things:

• An API for building batch components
• An XML based DSL for configuring batch components
• A contract of how batch components interact

JSR-352 does not provide any implementations of batch components. Spring Batch provides 17 readers, 16 writers and countless other utilities and extensions that have been tested for years in enterprise production environments. Spring Batch provides scalability options beyond a single JVM. Finally Spring Batch provides big data support both through the Spring for Apache Hadoop project and as a cornerstone of Spring XD.

To read more about Spring Batch's implementation of JSR-352, visit our reference documentation here: http://docs.spring.io/spring-batch/trunk/reference/html/jsr-352.html

Promote Spring Batch Integration to Spring Batch

From the outside looking in, it can be confusing to determine when to use Spring Batch and when to use Spring Integration. To be truthful, there isn't always a solid either/or answer. In many cases, the combination of the two technologies is the best option to provide robust, scalable solutions. This is why Spring Batch Integration was developed. A collection of Spring Batch extensions, this module allows developers to use Spring Integration to extend the power of Spring Batch. Functionality like multi-JVM scalability and message driven job launching are provided with no custom code and minimal configuration with this module.

The functionality provided in Spring Batch Integration extend batch processing beyond what JSR-352 provides capabilities to provide robust, enterprise grade solutions. You can read more about Spring Batch Integration and it's components in the reference documentation here: http://docs.spring.io/spring-batch/trunk/reference/html/springBatchIntegration.html.

Complete overhaul of dependencies

As part of an ongoing effort across the Spring portfolio, the Spring Batch third party dependencies have been updated. This allows users of Spring Batch to use the latest and greatest of the libraries they trust with Spring Batch.

Support for SQLite

Most integration test scenarios use HSQLDB as a datasource due to its ability to easily create in-memory databases. However, there are times when a simple, single file, option would be nicer. For that reason, we have added SQLite as a supported database for the Spring Batch repository.

Job scope

Spring Batch provides two custom bean scopes. The first, step scope, has been around for years as a way to delay bean initialization until the step the bean is used by is executed. With Spring Batch 3.0, we've added a job scope. This will allow the ability to lazily initialize job level components (JobExecutionListeners for example) as well as provide functionality like job parameter injection to those components. You can read more about the job scope in the reference manual here: http://docs.spring.io/spring-batch/trunk/reference/html/configureStep.html#job-scope.

Removal of "archetypes" in favor of Spring Boot

Spring Batch has traditionally provided a sample maven project as a way to bootstrap a Spring Batch project. With Spring Boot, we've removed those projects in favor of using the dynamic bootstrapping capabilities that Spring Boot provides. We believe that Boot provides a far superior option to what the old "archetypes" provided.

Move from Maven to Gradle

Finally, this release is the first for Spring Batch to move from Maven to Gradle for an internal build system. This change will have zero effect on developers consuming the jars. They will still be available via Maven Central for maven users.

Looking forward

With this release, we look forward to planning and developing our 3.1 release. The 3.1 release will have two major themes: simplification and supporting the Spring XD efforts.

For the simplification side, we want to improve the usability of Spring Batch to a point where it can be considered for less "heavy" processes. By focusing here, it allows developers to "grow" a solution. Many times things that start out as simple scripts and evolve into processes enterprises need to lean on for mission critical functionality. We want Spring Batch to be a consideration at the script stage so that when that functionality needs an enterprise grade solution, it's already there.

Beyond core Spring Batch functionality, Spring Batch serves as a core technology for Spring XD. We will continue to expand Spring Batch's capabilities to support big data solutions through Spring XD and Spring for Apache Hadoop.

Conclusion

3.0.0 represents the completion of the next major milestone for Spring Batch. It brings the standards that JSR-352 provides to our community as well as providing an exhaustive collection of additional features for the advanced user. We look forward to your feedback in the forums, social media, and in person at SpringOne2GX!