The GA release of Spring Data release train Fowler marks the finishing line of 6 month of development. It's time to give you an impression of the content of this release and a brief overview about individual features. The major themes of the Fowler release train were performance improvements and enhanced Java 8 support that are mainly reflected in the Spring Data JPA and MongoDB modules but a lot of other ones have seen significant improvements, too.

The easiest way to upgrade to the Spring Data Fowler release train is by using Spring Boot and configuring the spring-data-releasetrain.version property to Fowler-RELEASE. If you're not using Spring Boot yet, add the Spring Data BOM to your <dependencyManagement />…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week, I'm in São Paulo, Brazil, where I presented a workshop on building cloud-native applications - specifically microservices - with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud and Cloud Foundry (via Pivotal Web Services).

• Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke has just announced Spring Data Fowler has gone GA, packed with lots of advanced Java 8 features, as well!
• The agenda for the Spring IO show in Barcelona, Spain is now available! Check it out!
• Done with the microservices hype? Then let's get practical on April 21st. I'll be talking about how Spring Cloud integrates service registration (e.g.: Eureka, Consul, or Zookeeper), declarative REST clients (with Netflix's Feign), reactive programming and the circuit breaker pattern with Hystrix to support easy, robust service-to-service invocations.
• Marius Bogoevici and Mark Pollack are teaming up for a webinar on Tues April 28th about Reactive data-pipelines with Spring XD and Kafka…

Note: the source code and test for this blog continue to evolve, but the changes to the text are not being maintained here. Please see the tutorial version for the most up to date content.

In this article we continue our discussion of how to use Spring Security with Angular JS in a "single page application". Here we show how to use Spring Session together with Spring Cloud to combine the features of the systems we built in parts II and IV, and actually end up building 3 single page applications with quite different responsibilities. The aim is to build a Gateway (like in part IV) that is used not only for API resources but also to load the UI from a backend server. We simplify the token-wrangling bits of part II by using the Gateway to pass through the authentication to the backends. Then we extend the system to show how we can make local, granular access decisions in the backends, while still controlling identity and authentication at the Gateway. This is a very powerful model for building…

This week I'm in São Paulo, Brazil presenting at QCon SP. I had an interesting discussion with someone who loves Spring's REST stack, but wondered if there was something more efficient than plain-ol' JSON. Indeed, there is! I often get asked about Spring's support for high-speed binary based encoding of messages. Spring's long supported RPC encoding with the likes of Hessian, Burlap, etc., and Spring Framework 4.1 introduced support for Google Protocol Buffers which can be used with REST services as well.

From the Google Protocol Buffer website:

Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages...

…

Spring Boot STS Tutorial

Spring Tool Suite 3.6.4 was just released last week. This blog post is a tutorial demonstrating some of the new features STS provides to create and work with Spring Boot applications.

In this tutorial you'll learn how to:

• create a Simple Spring Boot Application with STS
• launch and debug your boot application from STS
• use the new STS Properties editor to edit configuration properties.
• use @ConfigurationProperties in your code to get the same editor support for your own configuration properties.

Creating a Boot App

We use the "New Spring Starter" wizard to create a…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I've been busily preparin for a workshop I'll be giving at QCon São Paulo next week. If you're at the show, I hope you'll come out to say hi, ask questions and we'll talk Spring and Cloud Foundry. Obrigado!

1. The replay on my humble webinar introducing Spring Session is online, check it out!
2. Janne Valkealahti has just announced the latest release of Spring Security Kerberos 1.0.0.RC1, packed with new features and now - at long last!! - near GA! Go Janne and team, go!
3. Spring and Groovy & Grails Tool Suite lead Martin Lippert just announced STS and GGTS 3.6.4.
4. I put together a post on getting started with Spring Data Couchbase
5. Spring XD ninjas Marius Bogoevici and Dr. Mark Pollack are going to be giving a webinar on April 28th that introduces using Spring XD and Apache Kafka…

This blog was inspired by a talk that Laurent Doguin, a developer advocate over at Couchbase, and I gave at Couchbase Connect last year. Merci Laurent!

This is a demo of the Spring Data Couchbase integration. From the project page, Spring Data Couchbase is:

The Spring Data Couchbase project provides integration with the Couchbase Server database. Key functional areas of Spring Data Couchbase are a POJO centric model for interacting with Couchbase Buckets and easily writing a Repository style data access layer.

What is Couchbase?

Couchbase is a distributed data-store that enjoys true horizontal scaling. I like to think of it as a mix of Redis and MongoDB: you work with documents that are accessed through their keys. There are numerous client APIs for all languages. If you're using Couchbase for your backend and using the JVM, you'll love Spring Data Couchbase…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I am at DevNexus in Atlanta, GA along with a handful of Spring team members and Spring community luminaries. I'll be presenting a talk on getting started with Spring Boot and I hope you'll join me, or one of the many other talks on Spring team:

• Spring 4 Web Applications by Rossen Stoyanchev
• Cloud Native Apps with Spring Cloud by Spencer Gibb
• Building microservices with Scala, functional domain models and Spring Boot by Chris Richardson
• What is new in Spring Integration 4? by Marius Bogoevici
• Spring Data REST - Data Meets Hypermedia by Greg Turnquist and Roy Clarkson
• IoT Realized - The Connected Car by Michael Minella
• Keeping It Clean - Lessons learned from Open Source on how to polish code by Phillip Webb
• Spring Integration Java DSL - A Deep Dive by Gary Russell
…

This post is a guest post by Activiti co-founder and community member Joram Barrez (@jbarrez) who works for Alfresco. Thanks Joram! I'd like to see more of these community guest posts, so - as usual - don't hesitate to ping me (@starbuxman) with ideas and contributions! -Josh

Introduction

Activiti is an Apache-licensed business process management (BPM) engine. Such an engine has as core goal to take a process definition comprised of human tasks and service calls and execute those in a certain order, while exposing various API's to start, manage and query data about process instances for…