Spring Security is a powerful library for securing your applications that comes with a bewildering number of options. Based on Spring, it can be readily integrated into a Grails application. But why not save the hassle and use the new improved Grails plugin?

The plugin has gone through several evolutionary stages that started with the Acegi plugin. Its most recent incarnation is a complete rewrite for Spring Security 3 and Spring 3. One of the results of this is that the plugin will only work with Grails 1.2.2 and above. Another significant change is that there is no longer just one Spring…

Virgo 2.1.0.M03-incubator is available from the Virgo website. The changes include:

• Further performance improvements, especially for Windows users.
• Update the version of Logback to 0.9.24 and SLF4J to 1.6.1
• Minor bug fixes

The performance improvement was achieved by adjusting the log level of entry exit tracing.

As a result of the new version of Logback the syntax of the configuration file 'serviceability.xml' has changed slightly. More information can be found here.

We have now published a plan outline for the future of Virgo so you have a better idea of where we are going.

SpringSource Hyperic 4.4 was released earlier this week that brings enhanced management of VMware virtualized environments through integration with VMware vCenter.  While Hyperic has long had support for VMware technologies (a.k.a. VMware Infrastructure or VI), the availability of the VI Java API (http://vijava.sf.net) made our jobs much easier, because the power SDK streamlined how a Java application can interact with VI back then.  By adopting the VI Java API, we were able to keep up with VMware's evolution easily from VI to VMware vSphere, as it is known today.  This also allowed us to…

I'm pleased to announce the first milestone of Spring Web Flow 2.2 is now available for download. The release is also available through the Maven milestone repository at http://maven.springframework.org/milestone. As with Spring Web Flow 2.1, this release requires JDK 1.5, Spring 3 and Spring Security 3.

The main focus of the release is to address the needs of JSF users by extending the list of supported JSF 2 features. Not long ago Web Flow 2.1 made it possible to use JSF 2 dependencies without the need for the separate Sun Facelets jar that is commonly used with JSF 1.2 today.

In Spring Web…

I am happy to announce the first milestone release of the Spring GemFire project, the newest member in the Spring family. Spring GemFire (for short SGF) brings the Spring concepts and programming model to GemFire, SpringSource's distributed data management platform. The release is available for both Java and .NET.

The features in 1.0.0.M1 include:

• declarative dependency injection style configurations for the GemFire infrastructure (such as Cache, Region, Interest, etc)
• exception translation to Spring's portable DataAccess exception hierarchy
• Template and callback support for easy native API access
• transaction management support
• Spring-backed wiring for GemFire managed objects
• auto-generation of non-reflection based Instantiators

We look forward to your feedback!

Spring Security is well-known for being highly customizable, so for my first attempt at working with Google App Engine, I decided to create a simple application which would explore the use of GAE features by implementing some core Spring Security interfaces. In this article we'll see how to:

• Authenticate using Google Accounts.
• Implement "on-demand" authentication when a user accesses a secured resource.
• Supplement the information from Google Accounts with application-specific roles.
• Store user account data in an App Engine datastore using the native API.
• Setup access-control restrictions based on the roles assigned to users.
• Disable the accounts of specific users to prevent access.

You should already be familiar with deploying applications to GAE. It doesn't take long to get a basic application up and running and you'll find lots of guidance on this on the GAE website.

Sample Application

The registered users are stored as GAE datastore entities. On first authenticating, new users are redirected to a…

It's great to hear that people are finding these articles useful, so it's with great pleasure that I add another to the series. This time I'm going to talk about associations again, but with the focus on when they are loaded into memory.

Update 2 Aug 2010 I have added more information on eager fetching with one-to-many relationships because there are some issues you need to be aware of.

It's cool to be lazy

One of the first things people learn about GORM relationships is that they are loaded lazily by default. In other words, when you fetch a domain instance from the database, none of its relations will be loaded…

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