Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring!

Today, Oracle released Java 8 and all its many wonderful features at EclipseCon. Java 8 is finally here! Be sure to grab your JDK today.

There are lots of fine features - like lambas - that enhance Spring application development. To learn more, be sure to check out Spring project lead Juergen Hoeller's webinar on the 25th of March on the subject of Spring 4 and Java 8. I'll be there!

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

1. InfoQ has posted a very nice article introducing Spring Boot today by Dan Woods. Dan does a very good job, I'd recommend it.
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Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013 in Santa Clara, CA

Speaker: Josh Long (Pivotal) and Kevin Nilson (Google)

It'd be nice to assume everything remains the same from one environment to another, but the realities of today's deployment targets (clouds, app servers, etc.) make this difficult. An application may target one in-memory database in development and target a traditional database in production. A/B testing is a common practice that lets you incrementally expose potentially high risk features. Feature switches can be invaluable; should something go wrong, you can revert to a known state. All of these use cases, and more, can be handled using the Spring framework. Join JavaOne Rock Star and Java Champion Kevin Nilson and Spring Developer Advocate Josh Long for a look at how you can run your application in differing environments using the Spring Framework.

Learn more about Spring at http://www.spring.io

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Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013, in Santa Clara, CA

Speakers: Roy Clarkson and Josh Long

No application is an island and this is more obvious today than ever as applications extend their reach into people's pockets, desktops, tablets, TVs, Blu-ray players and cars. What's a modern developer to do to support these many platforms? In this talk, join Josh Long to learn how Spring can extend your reach through (sometimes Spring Security OAuth-secured) RESTful services exposed through Spring MVC, HTML5 and client-specific rendering thanks to Spring Mobile, and powerful, native support for Android with Spring Android.

Learn more about Mobile and Spring at: http://projects.spring.io/spring-framework (Spring MVC + Spring MVC's REST impl)

http://projects.spring.io/spring-security-oauth

http://projects.spring.io/spring-hateoas

http://projects.spring.io/spring-mobile

http://projects.spring.io/spring-android

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Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013 in Santa Clara, CA.

Speakers: Jon Brisbin, Stephane Maldini Reactor was recently made public after a two-year incubation, evolving slowly alongside frameworks like Storm, Akka, Play, GPars or Vert.x. Integrated with Grails starting with version 2.3, Reactor takes the best ideas from several asynchronous toolsets and synthesizes them into a coherent framework that supports a variety of runtime topologies and makes it easy for developers to efficiently leverage their cloud or traditional hardware assets. Reactor is equally at home inside or outside a Spring ApplicationContext and also provides first-class Groovy support in the form of DSLs and language extensions. Special attention has been given to make Reactor easy enough to use to create single-file node.js-like applications, while maintaining a solid asynchronous toolset that works with Big and Fast Data tools like Gemfire, Spring Integration, and Spring Batch. This talk will give Reactor a proper introduction and show sample code that demonstrates the event-driven and composition-based nature of Reactor applications.

Learn more about Spring Framework 4.0 http://projects.spring.io/spring-framework

Learn more about Spring Boot http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot

Learn more about using CloudFoundry at: http://cloudfoundry.org/

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

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

Stay tuned to the Spring Blog for a mini blog series introducing this exciting new library. If you can't wait to get your feet wet, refer to the project's Getting Started section on GitHub.

Yesterday, the 12th of March, 2014, was the 25th anniversary of Sir Tim Berner's Lee having invented the web. As he explains: "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and—ta-da!—the World Wide Web." Elementary, really. (Hah!)

Pictured (taken from Wikimedia) is the original NeXT workstation (whose operating system , NeXT Step, underpins today's OS X and iOS design) on which Sir Tim Berners-Lee put together the initial HTTP service and client.

As an aside: I've always wondered what it would be like to be able to…

On behalf of Michael Nitschinger, I'm happy to announce the 1.0 GA release of the Couchbase Spring Data module.

Between the last release candidate and the final release, several bugs have been fixed and new features have been added. Notable additions are the support for custom converters, JSR-303 Validation support and built-in support for temporal objects like Dates, Calendars and similar JodaTime variants.

The release artifacts are available via Maven Central. You can find the reference documentation, JavaDoc and a change log at the usual expected places.

From now on, the Couchbase module will be part of the official Spring Data release trains, starting with Dijkstra. Now that the first GA release is out of the door, we will put…

I am happy to announce the first service release of the Spring Data release train named Codd. The full list of participating modules looks as follows:

• Spring Data Build 1.3.1 - Changelog
• Spring Data Commons 1.7.1 - Artifacts - JavaDoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data JPA 1.5.1 - Artifacts - JavaDoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data MongoDB 1.4.1 - Artifacts - JavaDoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Neo4j 3.0.1 - Artifacts - JavaDoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Solr 1.1.1 - Artifacts - JavaDoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data REST 2.0.1 - Artifacts - JavaDoc - Documentation - Changelog
…

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 AMQP lead Gary Russell has just announced that Spring AMQP 1.3.0 has just been released!
2. Spring Social lead Craig Walls just announced the first, long-awaited, RC of Spring Social 1.1. Hurray! I'm excited to see this new release.
3. Spring Security lead Rob Winch has just announced a security fix for Spring Security 3.2.2 and 3.1.6.
4. Dr. Dave Syer, co-lead on Spring Boot, among many, many other amazing things, has thrown together a sexy looking Spring Boot wrapper for Ratpack, a toolkit for JVM web applications. That's so awesome.
5. Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke has just announced that the first service release for Spring Data Babbage is now available
6. I put together a post on the various deployment strategies for Spring Boot applications
7. Don't miss Mattias Arthursson on a webinar March 18th, presenting Spring LDAP 2.0.0.
8. Join Juergen Hoeller and the Spring Team for a webinar on Java 8 and Spring Framework 4.0 on March 25!
9. Speaking of Spring Data, check out the replay of this talk introducing Spring Data repository best practices from SpringOne2GX 2013
10. Don't miss John Hann's introduction to pragmatic JavaScript from SpringOne2GX 2013
11. Emanuel Rabina gave a talk at SpringOne2GX 2013 on improving your Spring view layer with natural templates and Thymeleaf: check it out!
12. The More Vaadin blog has a nice, if short, post on the Spring Boot/ Vaadin integration that Vaadin's Petter Holmström and I have been working on . Nice! As always, this is open-source so don't be shy and be sure to send any feedback you have.
13. In related news, snapshots of the Vaadin4Spring integration that Petter and I are working on are now published on Sonatype's repository - enjoy!
14. Our pal Eberhard Wolff is back, and this time he's written up a nice (German-language) post on Spring 4.0 and Spring Boot, among (many) other things
15. David Williams blog, A Time-to-Value Story with Cloud Foundry, is thought-provoking: how quickly can a technology deliver value - measurable value?
16. Martin Fowler has started watching the micro services space. Nothing to report, specifically. This is just a page I'd recommend watching.
17. Layer 7, a CA technologies company, has just released results of a survey focused on API design and deployment. There are many takeaways from the survey, so be sure to read it, but one thing I thought particularly promising: a predicted growth in Hypermedia-aware APIs among API developers. If you're interested in embracing hypermedia, and the design pattern HATEOAS, I would encourage you to check out Spring HATEOAS and - if you'd like to learn more about using Spring HATEOAS and Spring Boot, check out this tutorial and adjoining code.