It's May, already! Seems like just yesterday we were toasting the arrival of the new year...

As they say, time flies when you're having fun! This year's been a roller coaster - exciting news and events every day - too much to keep up with, certainly!

1. Jon Brisbin has written up an epic post introducing the CloudFoundry project and many of the technologies that you can use on it.

   This was just put up today, and is now one of my favorite blogs introducing CloudFoundry; it's so ambitious, just like CloudFoundry itself!

2. Another masterpiece of a sample is the blog that Costin Leau wrote, Getting Started with Redis and Spring Cloud Foundry. This post is well worth reading whether you're doing CloudFoundry, Spring Data, or both. A dynamic duo, indeed!

<li>European community members can learn more about Spring, Spring Data and Cloud Foundry at the S2G Forum Series: <a href="http://www.springsource.com/events/s2gforum-5-26-2011-amsterdam">Amsterdam (May 26th)</a> and <a href="http://www.springsource.com/events/s2gforum-5-31-2011-london">London (May 31st)</a>. There will be tons of great sessions about Spring, Groovy and Grails as well as talks focused specifically on CloudFoundry, Tomcat and Gemfire so be sure to <a href="http://www.springsource.org/s2gforum2011">register for the event</a> closest to you. 

</li>

3. Spring Security 3.1.0.RC2 Released -- the title sums it up. Check out the link for the changelog. For more on Spring Security, keep reading - there are a couple of very interesting posts about Spring Security a little further down!
4. Spring Social 1.0.0.M3 Released. The new release continues the exciting evolution of the core concepts laid out in the earlier releases. Specifically, this new release enhances the APIs for some of the social APIs, extends the plugin mechanism, and provides a pre-packaged Spring MVC Controller that adds provider sign in capability to your application.
5. On the CloudFoundry blog, Killian Murphy updates the community on the latest and greatest on in the CloudFoundry project. The activity's been amazing, and the fact that - in the three weeks since CloudFoundry's debut - people have submitted GitHub.com pull requests for JRuby, PHP and Erlang support in the CloudFoundry open-source PaaS is a testament to this. Amazing!

6. Recently, SpringSource put up a survey about dm Server and Virgo usage. The results of that survey are available here.

7. In this post - Single Spring Application Deployment for both Local and CloudFoundry.com Servers - David Salter introduces Spring 3.1's profiles, and how to use them to deploy a single both locally and in the cloud. Check it out for a good step-by-step!
8. Tobias Trelle introduces RabbitMQ and Spring, walking the developer through installation and setup.
9. Rafal Borowiec introduces Spring Security 3.1's enhanced security namespace configuration.
10. Steffen Luypaert writes an interesting post on migrating from Spring Security 2 to Spring Security 3. It highlights the few specific steps - including a few "gotchas" that might strike very specific cases - required to ensure a smooth upgrade. Very cool!
11. A perspective on the CloudFoundry PaaS. The thrust of it - that CloudFoundry reduces friction and enables developers - should resonate well with the numerous developers who've had a chance to work with it already. Check it out, and of course then follow up with a visit to CloudFoundry.com and CloudFoundry.org to try it out for yourself and learn more!
12. People ask me frequently about the best way to learn Spring and how to get training to improve their Spring skills. Without exception, I refer them to the SpringSource training that is created by the project leads and engineers behind the Spring technologies. The trainers are also some of the most knowledgeable people at SpringSource - they have the macro, birds-eye view and the micro view of the entire technology stack from concepts to API to implementation. So, I'm pleased to remind you that SpringSource has just announced new certifications for trainings and the training schedule. See this overview of certification and this schedule post for more information.

    If you're like me, and you've been using and advocating Spring and the Spring projects since the very beginning, then please understand that there's very likely still something for you in this training. I was stunned by how much I learned!