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…

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…

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…

Guillaume and Paul Mark provide:

• A myriad of DSL examples from specialized computing requirements to general business tasks
• Characteristics to keep in mind when creating your own DSL
• Details about Groovy's DSL advantages including flexible and malleable syntax, runtime meta-programming, regular expression pre-processing as well as being a Java based runtime
• Pitfalls and problems to avoid with concrete examples

Many thanks to InfoQ for covering SpringOne 2GX 2010 and providing this outstanding presentations to the community.

UPDATE: The FeatureSpecification functionality described in this blog post was removed in Spring Framework 3.1 M2 in favor of @Enable* annotations. See the 3.1 M2 announcement for more information.

Introduction

Earlier in this series I touched on how the new @Profile annotation can be used in conjunction with @Configuration classes to take advantage of Spring's bean definition profiles. Today, we'll look at an entirely new addition to the code-based configuration landscape in Spring 3.1: FeatureSpecification classes and their related support.

I've put together a sample project to accompany this post. Find it at https://github.com/cbeams/spring-3.1-featurespec and follow the instructions in the README…

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.

	  </li>


<li>
	Matt Raible has put…

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…

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…

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…