I was recently made aware that a public API we were using for one of our guides contained objectionable material. After confirming this, I immediately responded that we would pick another source. Wishing to avoid such an issue in the future, I decided the best solution was to build our own RESTful quote service. So I decided to use the best tools to do so, the Spring stack, and was able to migrate the very next day.

Picking your tools

To kick things off, I made a check list of what I knew would be the right tools for the job of creating a RESTful web service.

• Spring Data JPA - quickly pre-load, fetch, and potentially update content
• Spring MVC - solid REST support since Spring 3
• Spring Boot - create all the needed components with little to no effort
• http://start.spring.io - assemble a project by simply checking the desired items on a form
…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's a few weeks before SpringOne2GX 2014, already! Time sure flies when you're having fun! The beginning of 2015 will mark the 4th year of This Week in Spring, and it's more exciting every week! I'm hoping to see as many of you as possible at SpringOne2GX 2014. This is sure to be an amazing event.

Anyway, with that out of the way, let's get on to this week's roundup!

1. Spring Security lead Rob Winch just announced Spring Security 4.0.0.M2, which

provides a lot of great features, including improved Security-aware testing support, Spring Data integration, support for websocket security, and ties into the nascent Spring Session projet that was derived from the work for this release. Check it out! Rob also announced Spring Security 3.2.5 and 3.1.7…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. We've got a lot of cool stuff happening and, as you might imagine, the entire team is abuzz in preparation for SpringOne2GX 2014, coming in just a few short weeks! If you haven't registered, now's the time to do so!

1. Spring Security lead and all-around sleepless ninja Rob Winch has just announced that Spring MVC Test HtmlUnit 1.0.0.M2 has been released. This is an awesome release if you're trying to unit test real pages with Spring MVC

• Spring Boot 1.1.5 has just been released. The new release mainly addresses a few issues and is a recommended upgrade for all users.
• I really enjoyed this blog, ¿Qué es Spring Framework?, which tries to explain what the fundamental value of Spring is. Largely, the (Spanish language) article explains that Spring handles the lifecycle for objects in a consistent way. It's easy to plug in various frameworks, software, around the edges when the fundamental life-cycle is handled. I would point out that this post uses Spring…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it.

1. Spring Cloud lead Ramnivas Laddad has written up a nice post that looks at how to extend Spring Cloud to consume other services in a consistent manner.

• I liked Samer Abdelkafi's blog introducing how to use Java configuration with Spring. It's always a good time to review..
• The Pragmatists blog has a detailed look at the sort of (tortured) steps involved in using Spring with the Play! web framework
• Biju Kunjummen put together a great post that looks at how to deploy a Spring Cloud enabled application to Cloud Foundry
• Thys Michels is back at it again, this time with a post on building a ToDo application with Spring MVC and Angular.js
• I am really happy that this link is in this week's roundup, the author -Priyadarshini - did an amazing job! Check out this really thoughtful introduction to using Spring Boot to build a CRUD-capable Spring Boot-based application…

One of the most interesting capabilities of Spring Cloud is its extensibility. You can extend it to support additional clouds, enhance already supported clouds, support new services, new service connectors--all without modifying the Spring Cloud code itself. In this blog, we explore this capability. If you haven’t done so already, please read the first and second blog in this series to acquire sufficient background.

The three axes of extensibility

Spring Cloud provides extensibility along three orthogonal directions. You may extend it in one of these directions and orthogonality ensures that…

In the last blog, I showed you how to use Spring Cloud's Java configuration option to obtain service connectors declaratively (there is also XML namespace support, if you need it). In this blog, we will take a closer look at how you would use Spring Cloud programmatically. This will help in the situations where you cannot use Java or XML configuration. It will also demystify how Spring Cloud works and prepare for the next blog in this series, where we discuss extending Spring Cloud.

To work with Spring Cloud we need to access an object of the Cloud class. However, you can’t create a Cloud object directly (its constructor is not public). Instead, you will obtain it through CloudFactory…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week saw the release of the amazing Spring XD 1.0.0.RELEASE. The release announcement is a good place to start your big-data journey. There, you'll find links to other great posts, learning content, etc. This is a great opportunity to evaluate what you hope to get out of your data, and whether you're getting it. Spring XD is your big-data Swiss-army knife: it can support live, streaming workloads; batch-centric offline workloads; and general data integration solutions. If you digest but one post from this week's roundup, let it be …

Recently Juergen Hoeller announced the availability of the first of two 4.1 release candidates. Brian Clozel followed up with a post on the static web resources handling enhancements. Previously Stephane Nicoll blogged about cache and JMS related improvements. The goal of this post is to summarize Spring MVC improvements.

The JDK 1.8 java.util.Optional is now supported for @RequestParam, @RequestHeader and @MatrixVariable controller method arguments while ListenableFuture is supported as a return value alternative to DeferredResult where an underlying service (or perhaps a call to AsyncRestTemplate) already returns…

Date: June 18, 2014

Location: Toronto, Canada

WARNING: Audio is not great, but hopefully tolerable :)

Spring Boot, the new convention-over-configuration centric framework from the Spring team at Pivotal, marries Spring's flexibility with conventional, common sense defaults to make application development not just fly, but pleasant! Join Spring developer advocate Josh Long@starbuxman for a look at what Spring Boot is, why it's turning heads, why you should consider it for your next application (REST,web, batch, big-data, integration, whatever!) and how to get started.

Learn more about Spring Boot at: http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot

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