Since the big Spring 3 release last year, I've been working on a number of application development projects and extracting "showcases" of various framework features. These "showcases" are not reference applications or tutorials, they're more like acceptance tests for specific framework capabilities. After seeing a showcase, you should have a good idea of what the technology can do.

The first showcase I've put together is for Spring MVC 3, our web framework. It includes a sample project, along with a supporting slide presentation and screencast. After digging in, you should have a good…

The first maintenance release in the 2.1 branch of Spring Web Flow is now available for download.

Download | Changelog

The recently released STS 2.3.3 M2 introduced a series of enhancements to our Grails support for Eclipse. In this article I'll be discussing what you can expect to find if you try it out (grab it here: SpringSource Tool Suite).

Groovy-Eclipse

The grails tools actually build on and extend the Groovy-Eclipse support, which is developed by the same team at SpringSource. Earlier this year the Groovy-Eclipse tools won 'Best Open Source Developer Productivity Tool' at Eclipse-Con 2010. You can read more about the latest enhancements in the recent Groovy-Eclipse 2.0.2 release here: New and Noteworthy. I'm not going to focus on Groovy-Eclipse here, but some highlights from that release were:

• refactoring support: now supporting extract method, extract constant, extract local variable
• improvements in code formatting and indentation

Now, onto Grails!

Getting a new perspective

There is now a new Grails perspective to better organize the views and widgets we have been adding to STS. You can open the perspective in the normal way (Window>OpenPerspective>Grails). In the new perspective the first thing to notice is that the Eclipse project explorer is open, rather than the package explorer. The project explorer is using a custom content provider that shows a view of a grails project that should be more familiar to a grails developer: New labels and icons are in place for the groups of similar entities: domain objects, controllers, views, etc. However the biggest change is the new plugins folder. Previously when working with a grails project the plugin dependencies were tricky to see in the UI, being hidden in the classpath container and via some Eclipse linked source folder entries. Now in the project explorer it is much more obvious what the application dependencies are.

Also, related to plugins, we have a new Grails Plugin Project wizard. This is very similar to the Grails Project Wizard, but instead of running create-app, it will cause the create-plugin command to run. With this new wizard and the new support we have for local (inplace) plugins, it is much easier to develop your application following a plugin oriented architecture…

We are pleased to announce that the first milestone release of the Spring AMQP 1.0 project is now available for both Java and .NET!

Download it now: Spring AMQP for Java | Spring AMQP for .NET

Spring AMQP makes common Spring idioms available to developers who are building AMQP-based messaging solutions. For example, building a messaging application that uses RabbitMQ as a broker will feel quite similar to building an application based on Spring's JMS support. To learn more about the project, visit the Spring AMQP Homepage. There you will find links to the Reference Manual, Forum, Issue Tracker…

SpringSource has just released a new milestone version of SpringSource Tool Suite: 2.3.2.M2. STS provides the best Eclipse-powered development environment for building Spring and Grails powered enterprise applications. Here are some highlights from the release:

• integration with GWT and Google App Engine
• visual editor for Spring Integration
• support for Spring Roo 1.1.0.M2
• non-locking class loader infrastructure
• new Grails Project Explorer, Perspective and Plugin Manager
• new Subclipse and Subversive extension installs

This is also the first time we are providing bundles based on Eclipse 3.5 and 3.6. If you aren't quite ready to try the cutting edge milestone release, then you can always download the 2.3.2.RELEASE version.

You can also get community support in the Spring Development Tools support forums. If you want to provide direct technical feedback, open a JIRA issue against the SpringSource Tool…

I'm pleased to announce we've just released Spring Roo 1.1.0.M2 (download here). We've also concurrently released SpringSource Tool Suite 2.3.3.M2, which offers the latest integration with this new Spring Roo release. For production use we recommend you continue to use Spring Roo 1.0.2, although we know a very large number of people are happily using the Roo 1.1.0 development releases as well.

What's New?

So, what's included in the new Spring Roo 1.1.0 Milestone 2? Well, there's 140 fixes, improvements and enhancements since Milestone 1. Some of the highlights include:

• Performance has improved by a factor of three since Milestone 1
• Upgrades to Spring Framework 3.0.3, GWT 2.1.0.M2, AspectJ 1.6.10.M1, OpenJPA 2.0.0, Log4J 1.2.16 etc
• Better GWT support, such as eliminating the GWT 2.1 "bikeshed" JAR
• Greatly improved Windows startup scripts
• Improved shell usability, such as case insensitive option matching
• A new "web mvc view" command to simplify creation of MVC views
• Support for user-definable web locales via the "web mvc install language" command
• Extra data on demand capabilities
• Google App Engine integration test support
• Commands to help you easily create simple, advanced and internationalization add-ons
• Numerous add-on infrastructure improvements (see below)

More Add-On Discovery and Management Features

Spring Roo 1.1.0.M2 also features…

Recently we released the first milestone of the Flex Addon for Spring Roo as a part of the Spring BlazeDS Integration 1.5.0.M1 distribution. This addon aims to bring the productivity and usability benefits of Spring Roo to the development of Spring-based RIAs with Flex. The below 15 minute screencast (split into two parts) serves as a quick introduction to the addon and its capabilities. Watch as we go from installation of the addon to a fully functional Flex application backed by Spring in just a handful of commands.

Part 1 walks through the initial download and installation of the addon, as well as initial setup of a Spring Flex project using the Spring Roo integration in SpringSource Tool Suite.

Part 2 demonstrates use of the "flex remoting" commands to generate and update Flex UI scaffolding backed by Spring and Hibernate.

Virgo 2.1.0.M02-incubator is available for download. Apart from completing the "getting started guide", this milestone dramatically reduces startup time - by as much as 5x on some systems.

This should be a further incentive for users of dm Server to migrate to Virgo: Virgo is the codebase for future development, has more liberal licensing, and now provides much faster startup.

Measurements

We measured elapsed time for a warm startup (i.e. without -clean) of the Virgo web server and compared milestone M02 to M01.

On a quad-core Intel Xeon 2.66 GHz machine, startup reduced from 68 to 12 seconds, an…

In part 1 of this series, I introduced you to some of the subtleties associated with persisting domain instances with GORM. This time, I'm going to tackle relationships with particular focus on hasMany and belongsTo.

GORM provides only a few basic elements for defining relationships between domain classes, but they are sufficient to describe most needs. When I give training courses on Grails, it always surprises me how few slides cover relationships. As you can imagine, this apparent simplicity does hide some subtle behaviour that can trip up the unwary. Let's start with the most basic of…