By now, many of you have probably seen the Cloud Foundry webinar and Rod's blog from earlier today. I'd like to provide a quick follow-up that features a "hello-spring" sample application deployed in the cloud. Thanks to Cloud Foundry, there's practically no learning curve at all.

Before we get started, let's consider three goals that have driven Spring from day one:

1. focus on simplicity and productivity to make developers lives easier
2. support innovative technologies in a consistent way
3. ensure portability of applications across deployment environments

Then, consider those same three goals in relation to Cloud Foundry:

1. Simplicity and Productivity: Deploying a Spring application to the cloud is as simple as dragging and dropping within SpringSource Tool Suite, and even when building an application to run in the cloud, developers can take advantage of the productivity gains enabled by Roo and Grails exactly as they normally would.
2. Consistent Innovation: Projects like Spring Social and Spring Data embrace innovative technologies such as Twitter and non-relational data stores that are increasingly popular for cloud-based applications, and they do so in ways that are consistent with the existing Spring platform. Cloud Foundry provides services to support such applications. RabbitMQ will be available as a cloud service soon, so the same applies to applications that rely on RabbitMQ for messaging via Spring AMQP and Spring Integration.
3. Portability: The cloud is first and foremost a new deployment environment, and yet it's easy to create an application that can run in and out of the cloud without even swapping configuration files.

With those goals in mind, we've designed a sample application that provides an introduction to Cloud Foundry for Spring developers. This is the first of many…

Today marks an important day for developers, with the public beta release of Cloud Foundry, VMware’s open source Platform as a Service offering. Rod Johnson’s blog contains a lot of background details about this exciting announcement, and Mark Fisher’s post offers a first look at the service and how easily applications can move between a local environment and the cloud. As both Rod and Mark highlight today’s announcement is about enhancing and ensuring developer productivity.

In support of this new service and platform we are pleased to announce that we have integrated Cloud Foundry support into Spring Roo - Spring’s rapid application development tool for Java developers. Now you can take Roo’s productivity to the cloud and you don’t even have to leave the shell! There are dozens of commands to make it easy to work with Cloud Foundry, and of course you can build a new application and deploy it to Cloud Foundry in just a few minutes. Once you’ve logged in, it’s as simple as using the new “cloud foundry deploy” command and…

A couple of years back, the co-founder of a startup spoke at the London Groovy and Grails User Group. I remember vividly how he said he dreamed of deploying a Grails application with "just one click". With the announcement of the new Cloud Foundry service, his dream is nearly a reality for all Grails users. Now you not only get simple and rapid development with Grails, but also simple and rapid deployment to a cloud hosting provider.

So how do Grails and Cloud Foundry work together? As long time Grails users would expect, we have a plugin for that! To demonstrate how it works I'm going to walk you through deploying a sample application, Pet Clinic, to Cloud Foundry. It's a simple application and you can see it in action on Cloud Foundry…

Dear Spring Community,

I am pleased to announce that the second 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 Spring Data MongoDB subproject provides integration with the MongoDB document database.

Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog

To learn more about the project, visit the Spring Data Spring Data MongoDB Page…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring CodeConfig for .NET 1.0.0 is now available.

Download | NuGet Package | Support | Documentation | Community

		<p>Note also that Spring CodeConfig for .NET is also available as <a href="http://nuget.org/List/Packages/Spring.CodeConfig" target="_new">a NuGet Package</a>.</p>

This release contains the following major features:

• Code-based configuration similar to the @Configuration support in Spring Java
• Declarative Assembly Scanning to detect Configuration Classes
• Support for mixing and matching Code-based and XML-based configuration metadata
• Extension Methods to support Code-Based Configuration on existing Application Contexts
• Bootstrapping the Context configuration from either Code-First or XML-First approaches
…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the Spring.NET Visual Studio 2010 Extension 1.0.0 is now available.

Download | Support | Documentation | Community

This release of the Spring.NET Visual Studio 2010 Extension provides Intellisense support in the following areas for editing Spring XML configuration files:

• Type completion
• Property name completion
• Constructor argument name completion
• Property value completion for property of type 'Type', 'Enum' and 'Boolean'

In addition, this release also provides for the following enhancements to the Visual Studio 2010 XML Editor experience:

• Snippets integration (inline or by menu)
• Quickinfo tooltip for properties and types

A brief screencast of this tool in action can be watched here.

This project is hosted at GitHub.

As always, we encourage feedback from the community on this and all aspects of Spring.NET!

This year is moving along at a very quick clip!

We've already seen a torrent of new and exciting releases for Spring users and just today news of perhaps the most exciting thing yet went out. If you didn't get it because you aren't, for example, a registered SpringSource Tool Suite user, then here are the salient bits:

Next Tuesday - April 12th - VMware is hosting a webinar - "Spring into the cloud!" - with the provocative explanation, "Spring has already simplified enterprise Java development. Next up is cloud development."

The webinar will be presented for both Europe and North America timezones. See this page for details, and don't…

Dear Spring Community,

I am pleased to announce the third milestone release of the Spring Data Key Value 1.0 project, with support for Redis and Riak, is now available!

Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog

This release introduces several new features for Redis, such as:

• Support for a new Redis client, RJC bringing the number of Redis connectors to three
• New object-hash (and vice-versa) mapping
• Improved exception hierarchy
• Dedicated support for SORT, SORT/GET pattern and returned bulk values

Additionally, a new sample is now available that showcases the various Spring Data features: RetwisJ a Twitter-clone based entirely on Redis.

We look forward to your feedback on this forum or in the issue tracker.

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the first release candidate (1.0.0.RC1) of the Spring Data Graph 1.0 project with Neo4j 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 Graph Neo4j module provides integration with the Neo4j graph database.

Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog

To learn more about the project, visit the Spring Neo4j Homepage.

The…