This last week has seen a record number of... well, records, if nothing else! First, Juergen Hoeller - Spring project lead and all around nice guy - gave a webinar introducing the new features in Spring 3.1 to record attendance numbers. Then, as if that weren't enough, the next day the first milestone of Spring 3.1 was released to record numbers of downloads. That would've been enough. I don't know about you, but I could've stopped right there. Then, over the course of the last week we've seen what I imagine is a record number of new releases from other Spring projects! Finally, yesterday, no doubt in reaction to all this other record activity, we saw the largest record number of people hit the SpringSource blog yet! In summary, Spring 3.1 milestone mania, numerous new projects, and as always a healthy dose of community-awesomeness (go team!)

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  <li>Hot on the heels of Juergen's Spring 3.1 webinar, Chris Beams got the ball rolling on the  first three   of many  posts on the numerous new features in Spring 3.1. 
	
	<a href="http://blog.springsource.com/2011/02/11/spring-framework-3-1-m1-released/">

The first post introduces Spring 3.1 M1, generally. The second post introduces Spring 3.1's "profiles," which let you partition your beans along environment-specific lines with Environments. The third post introduces the Unified Property Management capabilities of the Environment abstraction.

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<li>
	Matt Raible has put…

Last year we introduced support for MongoDB in GORM (along with many other GORM implementations) and it has been extremely well received by the community. We have had a ton of feedback, and today we are pleased to announce a new release (Milestone 2) which addresses some of the feedback we have received.

Embedded Document Support

The number one requested feature was nested document support and in this release we have improved that significantly. Now you can embed other domains using the standard embedded mapping in GORM:

class Person {
  String firstName
  String lastName
  Address address…

Dear Spring Community,

I am pleased to announce that the very first milestone release of the Spring Data Document 1.0 project with MongoDB 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 MongoDB module provides integration with the MongoDB document database.

Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog

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

The…

In the first two posts of this series, I described the bean definition profiles feature, and how it relates to the Environment abstraction new in Spring 3.1 M1. Today we'll take a look at a second aspect of the Environment -- how it helps simplify the concern of configuration property management.

Understanding property sources

Spring's Environment abstraction provides search operations over a configurable hierarchy of property sources. To explain fully, consider the following:

ApplicationContext ctx = new GenericApplicationContext();
Environment env = ctx.getEnvironment();
boolean containsFoo = env.containsProperty…

Introduction

In my earlier post announcing Spring 3.1 M1, I discussed the new bean definition profiles feature as applied when using Spring <beans/> XML to configure the container. Today we'll introduce the new @Profile annotation and see how this same feature can be applied when using @Configuration classes instead of XML. Along the way we'll cover some best practices for designing @Configuration classes.

Recall @Configuration

For those unfamiliar with @Configuration classes, you can think of them as a pure-Java equivalent to Spring <beans/> XML files. We've blogged about this featureset before, and the reference documentation covers it well. You may want to revisit those resources if you need an…

After last week's release of Spring 3.1, there is some great material to help you get up to speed with the new enhancements. InfoQ has published another talk from SpringOne 2GX 2010, this one covers the Configuration Enhancements in Spring 3.1. Chris Beams covers unified property management, bean definition profiles, nested elements, c: namespace, Grails BeanBuilder integration.

Also last week Juergen Hoeller gave a webinar on the Spring 3.1 milestone release. In case you can were not able to attend in person, a full recording of the webinar has now been posted so you can get all of the details from the source!

Also don't forget to read Chris's recent blog post about Bean Definition Profiles. This is the first in a short series that will be covering the details of the new release.

The first milestone release of Spring 3.1 has just been published [1], and this article kicks off a series of posts where I and other team members will walk through each of the major features. Even in the first milestone there's already a lot to talk about!

• Bean definition profiles
• Unified property management through Spring's new Environment abstraction
• Enhancements to Java-based configuration with @Feature methods
• Expanded MVC namespace support and a Java-based configuration equivalent
• Streaming support and new interception model for the RestTemplate API
• Comprehensive caching support
• New c: XML namespace for concise configuration of constructor injection

Today I'll be covering the first item -- a new feature we call bean definition profiles. One of our most frequent requests has been to provide a mechanism in the core container that allows for registration of different beans in different environments. The word "environment" can mean different things to different users, but a typical scenario might be registering monitoring infrastructure only when deploying an application into a performance environment, or registering customized implementations of beans for customer A vs. customer B deployments. Perhaps one of the most common cases would be working against a standalone datasource in development vs looking up that same datasource from JNDI when in QA or production. Bean definition profiles represent a general-purpose way to satisfy use cases of this kind, and we'll explore the latter use case in the examples below.

Get hands-on with a sample

I've developed a small sample to accompany this post, and you might like to take a moment now to check it out (if not, don't worry; you don't need the code to read along below). Just follow the instructions on the README at https://github.com/cbeams/spring-3.1-profiles-xml. If you're not familiar with Git, the README has instructions…

The first milestone of Spring 3.1 is now available from our http://maven.springframework.org/milestone Maven repository or for direct download from our community download page. This release includes new features such as:

• Bean definition profiles
• Enhancements to Java-based container configuration
• Caching abstraction
• new c: XML namespace
• Improvements to Spring MVC

Stay tuned to the SpringSource Blog over the coming week for a series of posts covering what's new in 3.1.0.M1.

Download | Documentation | Javadoc API | Change Log | JIRA

Don't forget that Spring users can ask questions in the community forum and identify issues in JIRA as well.

We're pleased to an announce the first release candidate for Spring Security 3.1

Please see the changelog for a full list of updates since the M2 release.

The release is available from the Spring Community Downloads area and also from the SpringSource maven repository.

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