Today we are pleased to announce the general availability of the 2.0 version of our SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). You can find the press release here.

For the 2.0 iteration we focused on the two major feature areas that we identified based on the great feedback from our customer base and community: provide the best possible environment for Spring-based application development and provide tools to develop enterprise applications based on OSGi and the SpringSource dm Server.

I'd like to use this blog to introduce some of the new Spring development tools of STS 2.0. The new OSGi development tools have already been highlighted in an earlier blog…

In Spring 3.0, Spring MVC will be augmented with REST support. This post describes how to use the REST support to implement an AtomView on top of a simple sample application. Follow this step-by-step process to see how easy it is to implement an AtomView on top of a simple application with the new REST support in Spring MVC.

Step 1: Download the application skeleton

Attached to this blog entry, near the bottom, you will find a simple download that holds a skeleton for a web application. Inside, you will find all Spring 3.0 binaries needed for this application, plus a few extras needed for the Atom functionality. The Spring binaries are based on a nightly build and might be replaced with the final builds once Spring 3.0 has gone final.

Next, load up the project in Eclipse, using the 'Import > Import Existing Projects into Workspace' wizard (from the File menu). The application is a simple Eclipse Dynamic Web Project with all the infrastructure for Spring MVC setup. So if you are familiar to Spring MVC…

Hot on the heels of the Groovy 1.6 release, we are pleased to announce that Grails 1.1 final is out and available from the Grails site. There are numerous improvements that are listed in detail in the release notes. However, some of the key ones are:

Standalone GORM: It is now possible to use Grails' ORM layer (built on Hibernate) outside of Grails. There is an example that uses GORM inside a Spring MVC application in the samples/petclinic-mvc directory of the distribution. The example configures a GORM enabled SessionFactory using Spring as follows:

<gorm:sessionFactory base-package="org…

In the last couple of years, REST has emerged as a compelling alternative to SOAP/WSDL/WS-*-based distributed architectures. So when we started to plan our work on the next major release of Spring - version 3.0, it was quite clear to us that we had to focus on making the development of 'RESTful' Web services and applications easier. Now, what is and isn't 'RESTful' could be the topic of a whole new post all together; in this post I'll take a more practical approach, and focus on the features that we added to the @Controller model of Spring MVC.

A Bit of Background

Ok, I lied: there is some background first. If you really want to learn about the new features, feel free to skip to the next section.

For me, work on REST started about two years ago, shortly after reading the highly recommended book RESTful Web Services from O'Reilly, by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby. Initially, I was thinking about adding REST support to Spring Web Services, but after working a couple of weeks on a prototype, it became clear to me that this wasn't a very good fit. In particular, I found out that I had to copy most of the logic from the Spring-MVC DispatcherServlet…

Yesterday we published a final release candidate build of the upcoming SpringSource Tool Suite version 2.0. The RC build is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from the STS product page.

STS 2.0 is equipped with new productivity tools for developing Spring applications, like Quick Fixes, as-you-type validation and correction, project and bean creation wizards as well as a Visual Spring Configuration Editor and more. Stay tuned for more information on these new features.

Additionally STS 2.0 comes with tools for OSGi-based application development that experienced as well as new adopters…

Dear Spring Community,

I'm pleased to announce that the second public development milestone of Spring BlazeDS Integration, the newest of the open source Spring projects, is now available.

Download | Reference Documentation | JavaDocs | Changelog

The main features of note that have been added in this release are integration with Spring Security, and simplified XML-namespace-based configuration.  The namespace support results in significantly simpler Spring configuration files than using the full <bean> syntax, especially when using the new security features.

The community has thus far been providing us with some great feedback, and I encourage anyone interested to get involved by trying out the new functionalityand giving us feedback in the community forum and Jira as we progress towards a full-fledged 1.0.

We are looking forward to releasing RC1 in the very near future with the final major new features being centered around messaging integration, including support for both basic Spring JMS, and for more complex routing scenarios using Spring Integration channels.  

In case you missed it, Christophe Coenraets from Adobe recently provided a great introduction to Spring BlazeDS Integration on Adobe TV.  

Jeremy Grelle
Spring BlazeDS Integration Lead 

I'm very pleased to report here the very recent release of Groovy 1.6, which happened under the SpringSource umbrella, since the acquisition of G2One by SpringSource.

Groovy 1.6 is a very important milestone for the project, bringing tremendous performance improvements making Groovy the fastest dynamic language for the JVM, as well as several new powerful features adding more weapons to your dynamic language arsenal.

In particular, beyond the usual bug fixes and minor enhancements, let me mention the following novelties:

• multiple assignments
• optional return in if/else and try/catch blocks
• AST transformations and all the provided transformation annotations like @Bindable, @Vetoable, @Singleton, @Lazy, @Immutable, @Delegate, @Category, @Mixin and @Newify
• the Grape module and dependency system and its @Grab transformation
• various Swing builder improvements, thanks to the Swing / Griffon team
• as well as several Swing console improvements
• the integration of JMX builder
• JSR-223 scripting engine built-in
• various metaprogramming improvements, like the ExpandoMetaClass Domain-Specific Language, per-instance metaclasses even for POJOs, and runtime mixins
• OSGi readiness with the Groovy JAR being a full-blown OSGi bundle

A very detailed article on InfoQ, entitled "What's new in Groovy 1.6?", delves into all these new features and enhancements, with code samples and explanations.

If you wish to learn more about Groovy, and in particular Groovy 1.6, you should definitely consider attending SpringOne Europe, in April, where sessions on Groovy and Graills…

UPDATE - Feb 21 '12: Spring Framework has moved to GitHub, and for 3.2.x development has moved from Ant to Gradle. Take a look at the building from source section of the README there for (greatly simplified!) instructions.

Introduction

As Juergen announced last week, Spring 3.0 Milestone 2 is now available. In this post, I'll show you in six steps how to download and build the latest Spring 3 sources and get a development environment up and running in Eclipse.

We'll wrap up by discussing the best ways to follow Spring 3 development, how to file bugs and improvement requests, and considerations for…

If you aren't following the SpringSource blog you may have missed it, but last week Juergen Hoeller announced the availability of the second milestone for Spring 3.0. Juergen's blog post covers all of the details about the milestone including the new RestTemplate, early JPA 2.0 support, more Java 5 style API updates and other improvements.

You can always get the latest milestones, release candidates and full releases for Spring from the download center.