Spring Web Flow 2.3 is now available for download. You can review what's new in the reference documentation, see the complete changelog, or download the release.

A few of the highlights include:

• Launching a flow in a page embedded mode.
• JSR-303 bean validation support.
• Propagation of a flow-managed persistence context to sub-flows.
• Support for partial rendering with Portlet resource requests.

Dear Spring Community,

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

The Spring Social project allows you to integrate the APIs exposed by Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as Facebook and Twitter into your applications. The 1.0.0.M2 release includes:

• An extensible service provider framework that greatly simplifies the process of connecting local user accounts to hosted provider accounts.
• Full support for connecting to OAuth1 and OAuth2-based service providers from a Java/Spring web application environment.
• The ability for your users to authenticate with your application by signing in with their Twitter or Facebook accounts.
• Expanded service provider APIs, including more Twitter operations and initial support for GitHub and Gowalla.
• Complete reference documentation and samples!

See the changelog and reference guide for more information.

To get the software, download the release distribution, or simply add the maven artifacts to your project. To see the features live, check out the showcase app:
git clone git://github.com/SpringSource/spring-social-samples.git

We've been getting some great feedback from the Spring community about Spring Social and encourage you to collaborate with us on the project. If you are developing your own Java Binding to a SaaS API for use in your applications, be sure to checkout how to extend the framework and consider contributing your extensions back to the community!

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that a new milestone release (1.0.0.M3) of the Spring Data Graph 1.0 project with Neo4j support is now available!

The primary goal of the Spring Data project is to make it easier to build Spring-powered applications that use new data access technologies such as non-relational databases, map-reduce frameworks, and cloud based data services.

The Graph Neo4j module provides integration with the Neo4j graph database.

Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog

To learn more about the project, visit the Spring Neo4j Homepage.

The new…

More content has been posted by InfoQ covering the talks from SpringOne 2GX 2010. This time is it Spring in Action author, Craig Walls, talking about Developing Social-Ready Web Applications.

Craig covers:

• The types of social integration possible for your Spring applications
• How to access social data via REST
• How to secure social data in appropriate ways to protect your users
• The features available in the Spring Social project to support social integration within the Spring idiom.

Once again, many thanks to InfoQ for covering SpringOne 2GX 2010 and providing this outstanding presentations to the community.

The SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) provides the New Spring Template Project wizard. Uses this wizard, the user can see a number of project templates, choose one and let the wizard create a complete project, based on that template description. While this gives you an easy way to create new projects, you might wanna define your own custom project templates for your team or your organization. And we will show you how to do this in the following.

1. Step: Contribute a new resources extension to STS

STS creates the list of available project templates by downloading and reading resource XML files. To let STS know where those resource files are located, you need to contribute them to STS via an extension.

So the first step is to create a new and empty plugin project. You don't need Java code in there, so don't create this as a Java project. Just create a…

Applications don't exist in a vacuum. They need to communicate with their customers and with other applications. Application Integration is all about enabling this communication. Integration lets applications share services and data with each other, and, just as often, integration helps applications connect with their users.

Spring Integration provides a framework to build integration solutions, to facilitate these kinds of solutions. Spring Integration solutions describe the flow of data through a pipeline. Data enters the processing pipeline as a message. The message is moved forward through…

One of the major features added in Spring Framework 3.1 M1 is the generic cache abstraction for transparently applying caching to Spring applications. Just like the transaction support, the caching abstraction allows consistent use of various caching solutions with minimal impact on the code.

Purpose

Caches are in general used to improve application performance by transparently serving frequently accessed data in a faster fashion such as serving data from local memory rather than from the network. Many of you have already used caching, whether knowingly or not: most ORM/JPA frameworks provide…

What a week! Lots of good, foundational content available this week from, and for, the community. Let's get right to it.

 <li> <a href="http://blog.springsource.com/2011/02/21/spring-3-1-m1-mvc-namespace-enhancements-and-configuration/">Rossen Stoyanchev</a> continues the whirlwind introduction to the new features in Spring 3.1, this time with a look at the MVC namespace and @Configuration-based improvements. </li>

1. Chris Beams blogged about the upcoming FeatureSpecification support in Spring 3.1 Feature Specifications provide the same features as the XML namespace infrastructure elements, like <tx:annotation-driven>, in a Java configuration-centric way. This is a very powerful feature, and this blog post is the best way to get started.
2. SpringSource Tool Suite lead Christian Dupuis - tweets that users can now download STS without submitting to the registration form. Very cool!

<li> Can't get enough Spring? 

Check out Spring on your favorite social network!

3. Glyn Normington has just announced the Eclipse Virgo 3.0.0.M01 release is now available for download. The new version features tighter integration with the Eclipse stack, including the Eclipse Virgo Jetty…

In this 5th post of the series describing Spring 3.1 M1 features, I will focus on web applications. In the first half I'll discuss enhancements to the MVC XML namespace. Then I'll show how to create the equivalent of the MVC namespace with all Java configuration. At the end I mention some of the Servlet 3.0 related configuration changes you can expect in 3.1 M2.

MVC Namespace Improvements

Spring MVC 3.0 provided a custom MVC namespace. The centerpiece of the namespace -- the <mvc:annotation-driven> element, configured everything required to process requests with annotated controller methods. More importantly though it…