SpringSource Tool Suite 2.7.0 Released

Releases | Martin Lippert | July 05, 2011 | ...

Dear Spring Community,

We're pleased to announce the new release 2.7.0 of the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS).

Some highlights from this release:

  • Ships on top of Eclipse Indigo (3.7)
  • Includes Mylyn 3.6 and EGit 1.0
  • Updated template projects
  • Support for Grails 1.4.M1
  • Grails-aware rename type refactoring
  • Groovy-Eclipse 2.5.1, which includes support for Groovy 1.8 and DSL IDE support (DSLDs)
  • Support for Gradle

More details on new features and bug fixes can be found in the New and Noteworthy document. Detailed installation instructions are also available.

As always downloads are available from the STS download page.

Countdown to Grails 2.0: Static resources

Engineering | Peter Ledbrook | June 30, 2011 | ...

Web applications typically rely heavily on what we call static resources, such as Javascript, CSS and image files. In a Grails application, they are put into a project's web-app directory and then referenced from the HTML. For example,

<link rel="stylesheet" href="${resource(dir: 'css', file: 'main.css')}" type="text/css">

will create a link to the file web-app/css/main.css. All very straightforward. You might even think that the current support is more than sufficient for anyone's needs. What else would you want to do?

That's a good point. The answer depends on the complexity of your application, but let's start with the example CSS link above. Why do we have to type out the <link rel="..." href=...>? Just by looking at the extension, we know that the resource is a CSS file. We also know that CSS files should be linked into an HTML page using the…

This week in Spring: June 28th, 2011

Engineering | Josh Long | June 28, 2011 | ...

Welcome back to another installment of "This Week in Spring."

Lots of great stuff this week, as usual. When we compile this list, we trawl the internet looking for interesting stuff and try to bring it to you, digest style, in this weekly roundup. Some of the resources that we commonly check are Twitter, the SpringSource blogs, CloudFoundry.org, and Tomcat Expert,

We try to not miss anything, but we might. If you know of something that we've missed or think should be included, don't hesitate to ping your humble editors with any suggestions.

While SpringSource has a strong presence at numerous conferences and industry events, the premiere conference for Spring developers remains the SpringOne conference, held yearly in the United States. Work is well underway in planning the final program. Check out the SpringOne 2GX page to see news and activity, and to register, for the upcoming SpringOne2GX conference.

    <LI><a href="http://www.springsource.org/spring-social/news/1.0.0.rc1-released">Spring Social 1.0.0.RC1</a…

Spring BlazeDS Integration 1.5.0 GA Released

Releases | Jeremy Grelle | June 28, 2011 | ...

Dear Spring Community,

I'm pleased to announce that the 1.5.0 GA release of Spring BlazeDS Integration, the open source solution for building Spring-powered RIAs with Adobe Flex, is now available.

Download | Reference Documentation | JavaDocs | Changelog

This release includes just a few bug-fixes needed since the release candidate. To recap from the previous milestone releases, the major features included in 1.5.0 are:

  • Enhanced AMF serialization support, with proper handling of Hibernate lazy properties and collections, the option to use direct field mapping instead of property-based mapping, and support for specifying alternate constructors to default no-arg constructor.

  • A major refactoring of the Spring Security support, resulting in easier integration of Flex apps with various Spring Security features such as Remember Me, Session Fixation Protection, and Concurrent Session Control.

  • Easier customization and namespace-supported configuration of framework-provided services such as the LoginCommand and MessageInterceptors.

  • Support for reading and writing AMF content with RESTful Spring MVC @Controllers. This serves as a nice alternative to the direct RPC approach of the Remoting Service, reducing duplication of effort in applications that need to support multiple client types. (See the updated Test Drive for usage examples.)

  • Upgraded minimum dependencies to Spring 3.0, BlazeDS 4.0, Spring Security 3.0, and Spring Integration 2.0

  • A complete revision of the Maven-based Test Drive samples, including an update across the board to use Flex 4, and a new sample to demonstrate the RESTful programming model.

As always, I encourage anyone interested to get involved by trying out the release and giving us feedback in the community forum and Jira. We continually get great feedback from people having success with Spring BlazeDS Integration in their projects, and we look forward to hearing more about your experiences.


Jeremy Grelle
Spring Flex Lead

Spring AMQP for Java 1.0 RC2

Releases | Josh Long | June 27, 2011 | ...

We are pleased to announce that Spring AMQP for Java 1.0 RC2 is now available.

For details about the changes since RC1, please review the Release Notes here

In addition to a few bug fixes, this release provides the following:

  • Support for Exchange-to-Exchange bindings as well as custom Exchange types
  • Improved re-connection support
  • Added ChannelListener callback
  • Clarified Binding builder API semantics
  • Added a MessageProperties conversion strategy interface
  • Improved namespace coverage (e.g. <rabbit:template>)
  • Upgraded to RabbitMQ client version 2.5.0

Since this is intended to be our final pre-GA release, please take some time to try it out. In fact if you have a chance, really try to push the limits so that we know we're ready for prime time.

Thanks!
The Spring AMQP Team

Spring Social 1.0.0.RC1 Released

Releases | Craig Walls | June 23, 2011 | ...

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the first release candidate of the Spring Social project is now available!

The Spring Social project allows you to connect your Java applications to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as Facebook and Twitter.

This release includes:

  • Additions to the Facebook API binding such as photo and video upload, Facebook page support, and Facebook search.
  • Expansion of the Twitter API binding to include mobile notifications, blocking, and geo location operations.
  • Implicit sign up support enabling automatic sign up of a user from a connection.
  • A new quickstart showing how to get up and running quickly.
  • Numerous bug fixes and other improvements based on user feedback (see the changelog for details).

Also, with this release we have extracted the provider modules (Twitter, Facebook, etc) into their own projects so they can progress at a separate schedule from the main Spring Social project. Coinciding with the release of Spring Social 1.0.0.RC1, Spring Social Twitter and Facebook 1.0.0.RC1 are also now available.

To get the software, download the release distribution (Core | Facebook | Twitter) or simply add the maven artifacts to your project. To see it live, run through the quickstart and spin up the showcase app (recently updated for 1.0.0.RC1). 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.

It is awesome to see the community interest in extending Spring Social to work with numerous SaaS providers. Check out Matt Wright's work on Instagram and Foursquare and Morten Andersen-Gott's Yammer extension. Work on LinkedIn, Github, TripIt, and Gowalla has also started. We're committed to working with the community to build an ecosystem of quality Spring Social extensions. If you're integrating a SaaS API into your application, consider contributing to the Spring Social project. Have a look at our guide to extending Spring Social and discuss with the development team at our forum.

As we push toward a GA release, we would like to hear you think of the RC1 release. Participate in the forum or, if you have any suggestions or find any bugs, post them in the issue tracker. We hope you enjoy using Spring Social!

This week in Spring: June 21st, 2011

Engineering | Josh Long | June 21, 2011 | ...

Welcome back to yet another This Week in Spring. SpringSource is out in full force at JAX San Jose this week and we will be at OSCON, in July. These events are great avenues for us to connect with the userbase. As usual, we've got a nice complement of stuff to cover this week, so let's get to it!

          <LI>  There has been loads of interest and discussion surrounding last week's <a href="http://blog.springsource.com/2011/06/09/spring-framework-3-1-m2-released/">Spring 3.1 second milestone</a>.  Sam Brannen writes about the <a href="http://blog.springsource.com/2011/06/21/spring-3-1-m…

Spring 3.1 M2: Testing with @Configuration Classes and Profiles

Engineering | Sam Brannen | June 21, 2011 | ...

As Jürgen Höller mentioned in his post announcing the release of Spring 3.1 M2, the Spring TestContext Framework(*) has been overhauled to provide first-class testing support for @Configuration classes and environment profiles.

In this post I'll first walk you through some examples that demonstrate these new testing features. I'll then cover some of the new extension points in the TestContext framework that make these new features possible.

      Please note: this is a cross post from my company blog www.swiftmind.com.

Background

In Spring 2.5 we introduced the Spring TestContext Framework which provides annotation-driven integration testing support that can be used with JUnit or TestNG. The examples in this blog will focus on JUnit-based tests, but all features used here apply to TestNG as well.

At its core, the TestContext framework allows you to annotate test classes with @ContextConfiguration to specify which configuration files to use to load the ApplicationContext for your test. By default the ApplicationContext is loaded using the GenericXmlContextLoader which loads a context from XML Spring configuration files. You can then access beans from the ApplicationContext by annotating fields in your test class with @Autowired, @Resource, or @Inject

This week in Spring: June 14th, 2011

Engineering | Josh Long | June 14, 2011 | ...

Welcome back to another installment of "This Week in Spring," and what a week it's been! This last week saw the release of the Spring 3.1 M2 and vFabric 5! Lots of exciting stuff to talk about there, as well as general community news, so let's get to it!

  1. Today VMware announced the release of VMware vFabric 5, the application platform that defines the future of enterprise Java for cloud and virtualized execution environments. vFabric 5 contains many of the technologies that the Spring community is already familiar with including tc Server, Hyperic, GemFire, and RabbitMQ, but now adds some new technology.
    • Elastic Memory for Java (EM4J): a new capability for tc Server that provides a completely new level of coordination between the application server and the underlying virtual machine. EM4J uses the underlying vSphere virtualization to overcome some of the limitations of the Java's static memory heap.
    • Spring Insight Operations: leverages the same code-level tracing technology from the Spring Insight project but pulls together information from multiple application servers into a single console with roll-up views, drill downs, and historical comparisons ready for production systems.
    • SQLFire: vFabric SQLFire leverages the time-tested vFabric GemFire underpinnings providing data at memory speed and horizontal scale but vFabric SQLFire adds familiar and standard SQL and JDBC interfaces to the service.

    Rod Johnson discusses all the details of the release in his latest blog. Be sure to check out the latest release and try it out.

  2. Spring core lead Juergen Hoeller has announced that Spring 3.1.0 M2 has been released! At long last, the next step on the steady march to Spring 3.1 GA! The new release is as feature-packed as the last one, with a long list of major new features including (but definitely not limited to!) improved Java configuration support, XML-free and hassle-free Servlet 3.0-based Spring MVC application bootstrapping, new Builder APIs for JPA and Hibernate, and much, much more! Check out the release announcement here and get the bits from your build dependency management tool of choice or the download page
  3. <LI> Hot on the heels of the Spring 3.1 release announcement, <a href="http://blog.springsource.com/2011/06/10/spring-3-1-m2-configuration-enhancements/">Chris Beams chimes in</a> on the much-improved Java-centric configuration model in Spring 3.1, M2, even as compared to M1! The features are really starting to come together to make this one of the smoothest, well arranged releases, yet! </LI> 
    
    <lI> 
    

    Spring 3.1 M2 represents a marked improvement in core Spring, as well as Spring MVC! Rossen Stoyanchev chimes in to introduce the numerous (truly, you'll need to read the detailed blog to…

Defining the Future for Virtualized and Cloud Java

Engineering | Rod Johnson | June 14, 2011 | ...

Today I am proud to announce version 5 of our VMware vFabric™ application platform defining the future of enterprise Java for cloud and virtualized execution environments. vFabric blazes the path to new and modern cloud architectures by providing a modern programming model paired with next-generation platform services. A path that is not overgrown with the cruft and complexity of prior-generation technologies. With vFabric 5, VMware is ensuring that enterprise Java is ready to meet the challenges of tomorrow’s demanding, data-intensive, massively scalable applications.

vFabric 5 continues to provide the best place to run your Spring applications with vFabric tc Server and the ability to monitor and manage those production solutions with incredible intelligence via vFabric Hyperic. The platform also addresses the technical challenges of cloud computing head on, supporting new approaches to data management that enable applications to scale across elastic, geographically distributed cloud architectures with our vFabric GemFire and RabbitMQ

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