Not too long ago, I introduced DSL descriptors (DSLDs) for Groovy-Eclipse. DSLDs are Groovy scripts that provide rich editing support (content assist, navigation, etc.) for Groovy projects in your Eclipse workspace. Since DSLDs can only be executed inside a running Eclipse process, debugging is not as simple as firing up the Eclipse debugger and stepping through a Groovy script. In this post, I'll describe some simple and some more complex techniques that you can use for debugging your DSLDs.

To get all of this working, you will need the latest development builds:

• Groovy-Eclipse: http://dist.codehaus.org/groovy/distributions/greclipse/snapshot/e3.7/
• STS Grails Tooling (optional, for debug evaluations): http://dist.springsource.com/snapshot/TOOLS/nightly/e3.7
• AJDT (optional, for debug evaluations): http://download.eclipse.org/tools/ajdt/37/update

Simple and crude

The simplest and crudest way to debug your DSLDs is by using println. This will print expressions to the standard out of the running Eclipse process, which can be seen if you launched your Eclipse from the command line. However, I recommend using a log statement instead. This will print logging information to the Groovy event console…

In a previous article, Behind the Spring Security Namespace, I talked about how the Spring Security namespace has been very successful in providing a simple alternative to plain Spring bean configuration, but how there is still a steep learning curve when you want to start customizing its behaviour. Behind the XML elements and attributes, various filters and helper strategies are created and wired together, but, short of reading the code which handles the XML parsing, there is no easy way of working out which classes are involved or the details of how they interact.

For some time now, we've been trying to come up with an alternative Java-based solution using Spring's @Configuration classes that retains the simplicity of the XML namespace but also makes the underlying behavior more transparent and easier to customize. While theoretically possible, no Java-based solution seemed to meet…

Mark Thomas discusses all the latest features that are available in Apache Tomcat 7. He talks about the specification changes (Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2, Expression Language 2.2) some of the new features (JMX enhancements, performance improvements, new parallel deployment) and describes the upcoming plans for later releases. Check out the video or you can download the slides from the S2G Forum 2011 archive.

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.

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the second milestone release (1.0.0.M2) of the Spring Data JDBC Extensions 1.0 project with Oracle Database support is now available!

The new Spring Data JDBC Extensions project was created to provide additional support for vendor specific JDBC extensions as well as new approaches to working with JDBC like QueryDSL. The bulk of the support is made up of code ported from the SpringSource project "Advanced Pack for Oracle Database" that was available for support subscription customers. We are now making this code available to all Spring…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce the release of Spring Social 1.0.0.RC2. Spring Social lets you connect your Java applications to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as Facebook and Twitter.

This announcement is for the Spring Social core project as well as the Spring Social Facebook and Spring Social Twitter projects which are also seeing their 1.0.0.RC2 releases today.

This release includes fixes for bugs reported since 1.0.0.RC1, as well as a few improvements:

• The Twitter and Facebook clients now support paging for API operations that can return paged results.
• ProviderSignInController now handles the scenario where the user denies authorization.
• The exceptional case where multiple local users are matched during a provider sign in attempt is now handled.
• The set of sample applications has been updated.

See the change logs for more information on what's new in this release (Core | Facebook | Twitter)

To get the software, download the release distribution (Core | Facebook | Twitter) or simply add the maven artifacts to your project. To see it live, run through the quickstart and spin up the showcase app (updated for 1.0.0.RC2). Supplement as you go with information from the reference manual.

Spring Social requires Spring Framework 3.0.5 or > to run. We recommend Spring 3.1 for new applications to take advantage of the latest advances in the core framework. See the reference manual for a full description of dependencies.

Many thanks to the community for helping us shake out and resolve issues in RC1. As we move toward the GA release, we appreciate the community involvement and are eager to hear your thoughts on this RC2 release. Participate in the forum or, if you have any suggestions or find any bugs, post them in the issue tracker.

We hope you enjoy using Spring Social!

It's only been a few days only since we've released Spring Data JPA 1.0 GA which is the first major version of a Spring Data project shipping with an implementation of the repository abstraction inside our Spring Data Commons module. The repository abstraction consists of three major parts: defining a repository interface, exposing CRUD methods and adding query methods. Adding query methods was discussed in detail in the first Spring Data JPA blog post. But defining a repository interface and exposing CRUD methods triggered quite some questions in earlier blog posts. That's why will have a…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that a new release candidate (1.1.0.RC1) of the Spring Data Graph 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. Back in 2010, Rod Johnson and Emil Eifrem started brainstorming about Spring and Neo4j integration including transparent persistence and…

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week finds @springsource at OSCON (and OSCON Java and OSCON Data) in Portland, OR. If you're here, come visit our booth in the exhibition hall or check the schedule for any of the numerous Spring-talks!

If you missed us at OSCON, or if you're simply looking for an even better Spring experience, be sure to register for SpringOne 2GX 2011, the premier event for Spring, Grails and CloudFoundry developers. SpringOne 2GX is a one-of-a-kind conference for application developers, solution architects, web operations and IT teams who develop business applications, create multi-device aware web applications, design cloud architectures, and manage high performance infrastructure. The sessions are specifically tailored for developers using the hugely popular open source Spring technologies, Groovy & Grails, and Tomcat. Whether you're building and running mission-critical business applications or designing the next killer cloud application, SpringOne 2GX will keep you up to date with the latest enterprise technology.

1. OSCON's great, but I will be taking an hour to watch the webinar, Getting Started with Spring Data Redis for North America, and Europe.

   You should too: <a href="http://redis.io/">Redis</a> is an open source, advanced key-value store known for its excellent performance, its small footprint and embed-ability. <a href="http://www.springsource.org/spring-data/redis">The Spring Data</a> project makes it easier to build Spring-powered applications that use new data access technologies such as non-relational "NOSQL" databases and cloud based data services. Check it out!  </li>
   

2. <a href= "http://www.springsource.org/node/3189">Spring Data Graph 1.1.0.RC1 with Neo4j support Released</a>
   The key changes in the Spring Data Graph 1.1.…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the fourth milestone release of the Spring Android project is now available!

Spring Android supports usage of the Spring Framework in a Android environment. The 1.0.0.M4 release focuses on updating support for the latest Spring Social release in native Android applications, as well as providing enhancements to Rest Template. This includes:

• Support for Spring Social 1.0.0.RC1, and Spring Security 3.1.0.RC2 through the Spring Android Auth module, which includes a SQLite datastore for persisting OAuth API connections.
• Updated RestTemplate (client) support, now at the level of Spring Framework 3.1.0.M2.
• Added gzip compression support in RestTemplate
• Added support for Google's Gson JSON parsing library. The Gson library is smaller than Jackson, however Jackson has faster performance.

Spring Android is supported in Android version 2.1 (API Level 7) and higher.

To get the software, download the release distribution, or simply add the maven artifacts to your project. To see the features live, check out the spring-android-showcase (updated for 1.0.0.M4).

In addition to the reference guide, Roy Clarkson has authored two blog posts to help you get started developing Android applications:

• Spring Android and Maven (Part 1)
• Spring Android and Maven (Part 2)

If you're building native Android applications, we invite you to collaborate with us on the Spring Android project!