Dear Spring Developers and Graphistas,

We're happy to present you with the release of Spring Data Neo4j 2.0 as a small Christmas gift from our side. Spring Data Neo4j is based on Neo4j 1.6.M02.

The major feature of this release is the addition of a simple mapping mode (spring-data-neo4j). Just annotate your POJOs and use a GraphRepository for the usual CRUD and advanced query operations.

For graph-attached POJOs and high performance use-cases, you can employ the advanced mapping mode (spring-data-neo4j-aspects), which leverages AspectJ to enhance your domain class.

Both mapping modes use the same underlying code, which is now based on the Spring Data Commons mapping infrastructure.

We improved the Cypher graph query language support by supporting new Cypher features, adding queries derived from finder-methods to the repositories and extended the result handling conversions to include projections to mapping-interfaces, Pages and more.

Besides also adding preliminary geospatial support provided by the Neo4j-spatial project, we also support new, type-safe Cypher-DSL which can also be used in conjunction with Query-DSL.

The example project are now included with the main source tree so that they are always up-to-date. The cineasts tutorial app is also included in the examples in 3 versions (simple mapping, advanced mapping, REST).

Thanks to the recent public availability of the Neo4j Add-On on Heroku, we included a chapter on how to deploy a Spring Data Neo4j application into the Heroku cloud. You’ll also find an accompanying example application called “todos” that is ready for deployment.

Special Thanks to James and Werner from Junisphere for all the code contributions and fixes.

In the last few weeks we got a lot more feedback on the Spring Forums, on JIRA and on the Neo4j Mailing list. We used your help to remove bugs, improve behaviour and documentation. Thanks a lot to everyone who reported issues and contributed insights.

To learn more about Spring Data Neo4j make sure to watch the introductory webinar by the project lead Michael Hunger and have a look at the extensive guide book. The detailed presentation from the Spring One conference is available on InfoQ.

And then please get your hands dirty and include Spring Data Neo4j in your holiday project which you could use to look at your domain with a fresh perspective.

Happy Holidays!
The Spring-Data and Neo4j Team

Project resources:
Downloads | Reference Card | JavaDocs | Spring Data Graph Guide Book | Changelog | GitHub Repository

Dear Spring Community,

to go on with SpringSource Christmas presents I'd like to announce the availability of Spring Data Mongo 1.0 GA. The release marks the end of a long road to the first step of developing sophisticated data access using a MongoDB datastore. The overall feature set includes:

• MongoTemplate to simplify performing common Mongo operations, including map-reduce and geo spatial queries
• Spring namespace to configure MongoDB instances, replica sets and JMX monitoring
• MongoConverter for domain class mapping and persistence
• Spring Data repositories support
• MongoDB Log4j appender
• Cross-store persistance - support for JPA Entities with fields transparently persisted/retrieved using MongoDB
• Java based Query, Criteria, and Update DSLs
• QueryDSL integration

Part of that release is the release of Spring Data Commons 1.2 GA which contains most of the core functionality of the high-level functionality such as entity mapping and repository abstraction. Note that we will remove the Spring Data Document repository from GitHub as we moved it to the Spring Data…

Today we're happy to announce that the Spring Framework has moved to GitHub!

As you've probably noticed, nearly every other Spring project has already made the move, and those that haven't will soon.

Git helps us with many of the challenges of managing a large codebase like the Spring Framework, but what's most exciting is what GitHub means for the Spring community. Many readers will already know the virtues of watching and forking repositories, pull requests, forking and editing, and the many other features that GitHub adds to the already excellent world of Git. If you're new to this stuff, be sure to check out the great materials at help.github.com…

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.

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

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	<P> 
		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…

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.