This week in Spring: August 23rd, 2011

Engineering | Josh Long | August 24, 2011 | ...

Welcome to another edition of "This Week in Spring" Things are moving fast and furious as we near next week's VMworld 2011. I want to invite any attendees to visit your expert technologists at the VMWorld Spring booth. Let me know if you read this weekly roundup. Lots to talk about this week, so let's get to it!

    <li>The preliminary session schedule has been published for <a href="http://www.springone2gx.com">SpringOne 2GX 2011</a>. This year's show is going to be another fantastic mix of deep technical content, cutting edge development and the absolute best place to learn about everything in the Spring universe. Be sure to <a href="http://springone2gx.com/conference/chicago/2011/10/register">register now</a>!</li>
    
    <LI> <a href="http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.6.RELEASE/changelog.txt">Spring 3.0.6's was just released!</a>   		 
    	 This release addresses over 50 minor issues and includes…

Micro Cloud Foundry for Spring Developers

Engineering | Josh Long | August 24, 2011 | ...

Today VMware team released Micro Cloud Foundry, a complete, local version of the popular, open source Platform as a Service that lets developers run a full featured cloud on their Mac or PC. Using Micro Cloud Foundry developers can build end-to-end cloud applications locally, without the hassles of configuring middleware while preserving the choice of where to deploy and the ability to scale their applications without changing a line of code.

Micro Cloud Foundry supports Spring and Java, of course, but also provides runtime environments for Scala, Node.js, and Ruby so that you can release your inner polyglot programmer! Micro Cloud Foundry also provides many services like MongoDB, MySQL, and Redis with come ready to use immediately without having to do extensive installation and configuration. With built-in dynamic DNS support, developers can run their Micro Cloud Foundry wherever they happen to be working – whether at home, office or coffee shop – without any reconfiguration required. After creating and testing your application on Micro Cloud Foundry, you can easily deploy your…

Using Micro Cloud Foundry from Grails

Engineering | Peter Ledbrook | August 24, 2011 | ...

Back in April, VMware introduced Cloud Foundry to the world and with it came super-simple application deployment for Grails developers. Fast forward several months and now another piece of the jigsaw is in place: Micro Cloud Foundry. You can now have your own Cloud Foundry instance for testing or any other use case. And of course, it's incredibly easy to use from Grails.

So what is Micro Cloud Foundry? The following screencast gives you a brief overview of the product and then takes you through the process of downloading, installing and configuring it. At the end, you get to see how you can…

STS Cloud Foundry Integration 2.7.0.M4 Released

Releases | Martin Lippert | August 24, 2011 | ...

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce a new milestone release 2.7.0.M4 of the Cloud Foundry Integration for the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). This milestone release includes support for the just released Micro Cloud Foundry and allows you to register users directly from within your IDE. In addition to that the milestone includes a number of fixes and improvements to existing features.

Installation instructions and a quick guide for the tooling is available from the SpringSource Team Blog: Using Cloud Foundry from STS.

Micro Cloud Foundry Gives Developers Their Own Personal Cloud

News | Adam Fitzgerald | August 24, 2011 | ...

Today the VMware team released Micro Cloud Foundry, a complete, local version of the popular, open source Platform as a Service that lets developers run a full featured cloud on their Mac or PC. Using Micro Cloud Foundry developers can build end-to-end cloud applications locally, without the hassles of configuring middleware while preserving the choice of where to deploy and the ability to scale their applications without changing a line of code.

Micro Cloud Foundry is available as a free downloadable virtual machine image and is compatible with VMware Fusion for Mac OS X and VMware Workstation and VMware Player (available as a free download) for Linux and Windows computers. It provides easy installation, setup, and virtual machine management and all you need is a Cloud Foundry account to get started.

Josh Long has created a getting started guide for Spring developers and produced a simple video tutorial.

Be sure to thumbs up the presentation if you find it useful and subscribe to the SpringSourceDev channel to receive updates about all the latest presentation recordings and screencasts.

Spring Data Graph 1.1.0 with Neo4j support released

Releases | Thomas Risberg | August 19, 2011 | ...

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the second release (1.1.0.RELEASE) of the Spring Data Graph project with Neo4j support is now available!

After the first public release of Spring Data Graph in April 2011 we mainly focused on user feedback.

With the improved documentation around the tooling and an upgraded AspectJ version we addressed many of the AspectJ issues that where reported by users. With the latest STS and Eclipse and hopefully with Idea11 it is possible to develop Spring Data Graph applications without the red wiggles. To further ease the development we also provided sample build scripts for ant/ivy and a plugin for gradle.

Of course we kept pace with development of Neo4j, currently using the latest stable release of Neo4j (1.4.1).

During the last months of Neo4j development the improved querying (Cypher, Gremlin) support was one of the important aspects. So we strove to support it on all levels. Now, it is possible to execute Cypher queries from Spring Data Graph Repositories, from the Neo4j-Template but also as part of dynamic field annotations and via the introduced entity methods. The same goes for Gremlin scripts. What's possible with this new expressive power? Let's take a look.

For example, in a repository:


	public interface PersonRepository extends GraphRepository, NamedIndexRepository {
	
	    @Query("start team=(%team) match (team)-[:persons]->(member) return member")
	    Iterable findAllTeamMembers(@Param("team") Group team);
	
	    @Query(value = "g.v(team).out('persons')", type = QueryType.Gremlin)
	    Iterable findAllTeamMembersGremlin(@Param("team") Group team);
	}

The Neo4j Template API got a complete overhaul which resulted in much fewer, more focused methods. The advanced query result handling capabilities (type conversion, mapping, single results, handler, etc.) are now implemented using a more fluent API. This new API is available for all types of queries, whether index lookups, graph traversals, Cypher queries or Gremlin scripts.


	template.query("start n=(0) match n-->m return m", null).to(Node.class);
template.execute("g.v(0).out", null).to(Node.class);

template.lookup("relationship", "name", "rel1").to(String.class, new PropertyContainerNameConverter()).single();

template.traverse(referenceNode, traversalDescription).handle(new Handler<Path>() {
            public void handle(Path value) {
                final String name = (String) value.endNode().getProperty("name", "");
                resultSet.add(name…

Countdown to Grails 2.0: Database Migrations

Engineering | Peter Ledbrook | August 17, 2011 | ...

One of the many nice features of Grails is the way it will automatically create your database schema for you from your domain model. Admittedly it's a feature of Hibernate that Grails uses, but still, it helps you get started very quickly with database-driven web applications without having to worry about the database schema.

What happens once your application moves to production? During development, losing the data in between server runs isn't a big issue. But you can't just drop the database in production. So that rules out the "create" and "create-drop" values for the dbCreate data source…

Chatting in the Cloud: Part 1

Engineering | Mark Fisher | August 16, 2011 | ...

Last week the availability of RabbitMQ as a service on Cloud Foundry was announced. Any application running on Cloud Foundry may now send and receive messages via a RabbitMQ broker that can be provisioned as a service with a single command (e.g. 'vmc create-service rabbitmq'). Instances of the messaging service may be shared between applications, and since RabbitMQ is a protocol-based broker, those applications may even be written in different languages. So, this is an exciting announcement for those interested in modular, polyglot, event-driven applications running in the cloud. I will be…

Configuring Spring and JTA without full Java EE

Engineering | Josh Long | August 15, 2011 | ...

Spring has rich support for transaction management through its PlatformTransactionManager interface and the hierarchy of implementations. Spring's transaction support provides a consistent interface for the transactional semantics of numerous APIs. Broadly, transactions can be split into two categories: local transactions and global transactions. Local transactions are those that affect only one transaction resource. Most often, these resources have their own transactional APIs, even if the notion of a transaction is not explicitly surfaced. Often it's surfaced as the concept of a session, a…

SpringSource Tool Suite 2.8.0.M1 Released

Releases | Martin Lippert | August 11, 2011 | ...

Dear Spring Community,

I'm pleased to announce that we just released the first milestone build for the next release of the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS).

This milestone brings mostly some updates and new features for Groovy&Grails developers, including:

  • update to tc Server Developer Edition 2.5.1
  • update to Maven 3.0.3
  • update to Mylyn 3.6.1
  • runs on JDK 1.7.0, including Spring Roo 1.1.5
  • validation and quick-fixes for constructor-arg
  • support for Grails 2.0.0.M1
  • enhanced DSL support for Grails 2.0.0.M1
  • lot of improvements for Groovy-Eclipse

More details can be found in the New and Noteworthy for 2.8.0.M1 document. Detailed installation instructions are also available, please look at the installation from the milestone update sites.

As always downloads are available from the STS download page, check "Other Downloads".

2.8.0.M2 is planned for the second half of September, followed…

Get the Spring newsletter

Stay connected with the Spring newsletter

Subscribe

Get ahead

VMware offers training and certification to turbo-charge your progress.

Learn more

Get support

Tanzu Spring offers support and binaries for OpenJDK™, Spring, and Apache Tomcat® in one simple subscription.

Learn more

Upcoming events

Check out all the upcoming events in the Spring community.

View all