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		Well, it's that time of the year again!  

The holiday season is upon us and many people will be celebrating! No matter what holiday you're celebrating (or if you're celebrating at all), let me wish you a wonderful week and the happiest of holidays.
To tide you over we've packed this week's roundup to the brim.
Enjoy!

1. Santa's elves could learn a thing or two from the SpringSource engineers! Alan Stewart announced Spring Roo 1.2.0 GA on Saturday. This version of Roo has caught the attention of a lot of people. While there are many new features, some of my favorites are the multi-module Maven project support (which lets you, for example, build your model classes in a separate project from your web application), support JSF / PrimeFaces scaffolding (as opposed to just GWT, Spring MVC, Vaadin, and Flex), support for services / repositories (using Spring Data JPA and Spring Data MongoDB; this is in addition to the Active record style data-access objects…

Amidst the flurry of Spring releases this month, Spring Python has it's own.

Versions 1.1.1 and 1.2.1 are maintenance releases that patch some bugs. Version 1.3.0.RC1 is the first release of 1.3.0.

In this release we have commits from team members, and have also merged pull requests through github. If you want to make contributions to this project, don't forget to sign the contributor license agreement.

Thanks,

The Spring Python team

Release Notes - Version 1.1.1

• [SESPRINGPYTHONPY-134] - AOPProxy throws an error unless target.__class__.__name__ == "instance"
• [SESPRINGPYTHONPY-151] - Fix XML parsing to handle non-ascii values
• [SESPRINGPYTHONPY-159] - Add DatabaseTemplate argument checks to execute that are like the ones used in query operation.
• [SESPRINGPYTHONPY-161] - Add installation steps to Spring Python's documentation

Release Notes - Version 1.2.1

• [SESPRINGPYTHONPY-159] - Add DatabaseTemplate argument checks to execute that are like the ones used in query operations
• [SESPRINGPYTHONPY-161] - Add installation steps to Spring Python's documentation

Release Notes - Version 1.3.0.RC1

• [SESPRINGPYTHONPY-159] - Add DatabaseTemplate argument checks to execute that are like the ones used in query operations
• [SESPRINGPYTHONPY-161] - Add installation steps to Spring Python's documentation

Here is more great content from SpringOne 2GX 2011, this time a detailed follow-up to the mobile demonstrations in the technical keynote. This video presentation is by Keith Donald and Roy Clarkson, who have been doing the advanced web work for Spring. In Making the Mobile Web Native with PhoneGap Keith and Roy cover:

• The emergence of HTML 5 based applications as a way to do cross platform mobile development
• PhoneGap APIs and Plugins for development that combine HTML 5 with native Android and iOS capabilities
• PhoneGap build process and remote debugging
• A complete walk-through for the Spring html5expense sample application

Many thanks to InfoQ for coming to Chicago to record so many of the fantastic SpringOne 2GX presentations.

Now that everyone has had a chance to see the keynote presentations from SpringOne 2GX 2011 and that Grails 2.0 has been released we can share more conference sessions from the 2GX side of the show. This video presentation is by Peter Ledbrook, Developer Advocate for Grails, and he discusses running Grails in the Cloud. He compares the different cloud providers out there and looks at some of the best solutions for hosting your Grails applications.

Many thanks to InfoQ for coming to Chicago to record so many of the fantastic SpringOne 2GX presentations.

It is my pleasure to announce that Spring Roo 1.2 GA has just been released. This release represents a significant amount of engineering effort by the Roo team and includes all the most popular features that the Roo user community have requested as well as many performance and usability improvements. The new features of Roo 1.2.0 are:

• Apache 2.0 licensed
• Multi-module Maven project support
• JSF / PrimeFaces scaffolding
• Services / repositories (using Spring Data JPA and Spring Data MongoDB)
• Database reverse engineering multi-schema support
• Flexible GWT support
• Shell usability improvements

In my next blog coming soon, I will detail the new commands available to use these exciting new features.

Alan Stewart Spring Roo Project Lead

In this new video interview from InfoQ, Spring expert, Oleg Zhurakousky talks about messaging, Spring Integration, and Cloud Architectures. This interview, filmed in October at JavaOne 2011, provides some background to how the Spring team has been thinking about emerging new models of application design for cloud platforms.

Oleg talks about :

• Developer choice and flexibility in cloud platforms and programming models
• Alternate approaches to retrieving data through messaging and noSQL options
• How messaging as an architectural paradigm is perfectly suited for large distributed systems

Many thanks to InfoQ for taking the time to talk to the Spring experts and providing this outstanding interview to the community.

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce the release of Spring Social 1.0.1!

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.

In addition to the core Spring Social project, Spring Social Twitter 1.0.1 and Spring Social Facebook 1.0.1 are also now available. Within these releases are fixes for bugs found since 1.0.0 and a handful of minor enhancements. Refer to the changelogs (Core | Facebook | Twitter) for more details.

We're also excited to announce that Spring Social LinkedIn 1.0.0.M4 is now available and includes a more complete API binding. We are looking forward to your feedback as we bring Spring Social LinkedIn closer to a 1.0.0 GA release. (Thanks to Robert Drysdale for contributing much of the LinkedIn API binding code!)

To get the software, download the release distribution (Core | Facebook | Twitter) or simply add the maven artifacts to your project. To see it live, try out the quickstart and fire up the samples. Supplement as you go with information from the reference manual.

Spring Social requires Spring Framework 3.0.5 or > to run. We recommend Spring 3.1 for new applications to take advantage of the latest advances in the core framework. See the reference manual for a full description of dependencies.

VMware's vFabric SQLFire became GA today. It is a memory-optimized distributed SQL database delivering dynamic scalability and high performance for data-intensive modern applications. SQLFire provides developers with a simple SQL interface and Spring developers can connect their application easily using plain JDBC.

• The SQLFire blog by Jags Ramnaryan provides an excellent introduction to the problems that this product helps to solve.
• Jags also provides a great video Introduction to SQLFire on YouTube.
• There is a great step by step tutorial to get you started with SQLFire.
• Interested developers can always ask questions in the SQLFire community discussion forum.

So if you are looking for a high performance, dynamically scaling data solution that has simple SQL access, be sure to download SQLFire and give it a try.