On Monday I announced the release of the first milestone of Spring Test MVC HtmlUnit with the promise of a blog series that would introduce it. This is the first of a four part blog series introducing Spring Test MVC HtmlUnit. The series outline can be seen below:

• In this first post we will explore the motivation behind Spring Test MVC HtmlUnit.
• The second post will demonstrate how we can integrate Spring MVC Test and HtmlUnit.
• Our third post will demonstrate how we can integrate Spring MVC Test with WebDriver.
• Finally, we will demonstrate how we can integrate Spring MVC Test with Geb.

Why…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring!

Today, Oracle released Java 8 and all its many wonderful features at EclipseCon. Java 8 is finally here! Be sure to grab your JDK today.

There are lots of fine features - like lambas - that enhance Spring application development. To learn more, be sure to check out Spring project lead Juergen Hoeller's webinar on the 25th of March on the subject of Spring 4 and Java 8. I'll be there!

As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it.

1. InfoQ has posted a very nice article introducing Spring Boot today by Dan Woods. Dan does a very good job, I'd recommend it.
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Yesterday, the 12th of March, 2014, was the 25th anniversary of Sir Tim Berner's Lee having invented the web. As he explains: "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and—ta-da!—the World Wide Web." Elementary, really. (Hah!)

Pictured (taken from Wikimedia) is the original NeXT workstation (whose operating system , NeXT Step, underpins today's OS X and iOS design) on which Sir Tim Berners-Lee put together the initial HTTP service and client.

As an aside: I've always wondered what it would be like to be able to…

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 AMQP lead Gary Russell has just announced that Spring AMQP 1.3.0 has just been released!
2. Spring Social lead Craig Walls just announced the first, long-awaited, RC of Spring Social 1.1. Hurray! I'm excited to see this new release.
3. Spring Security lead Rob Winch has just announced a security fix for Spring Security 3.2.2 and 3.1.6.
4. Dr. Dave Syer, co-lead on Spring Boot, among many, many other amazing things, has thrown together a sexy looking Spring Boot wrapper for Ratpack, a toolkit for JVM web applications. That's so awesome.
5. Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke has just announced that the first service release for Spring Data Babbage is now available
6. I put together a post on the various deployment strategies for Spring Boot applications
7. Don't miss Mattias Arthursson on a webinar March 18th, presenting Spring LDAP 2.0.0.
8. Join Juergen Hoeller and the Spring Team for a webinar on Java 8 and Spring Framework 4.0 on March 25!
9. Speaking of Spring Data, check out the replay of this talk introducing Spring Data repository best practices from SpringOne2GX 2013
10. Don't miss John Hann's introduction to pragmatic JavaScript from SpringOne2GX 2013
11. Emanuel Rabina gave a talk at SpringOne2GX 2013 on improving your Spring view layer with natural templates and Thymeleaf: check it out!
12. The More Vaadin blog has a nice, if short, post on the Spring Boot/ Vaadin integration that Vaadin's Petter Holmström and I have been working on . Nice! As always, this is open-source so don't be shy and be sure to send any feedback you have.
13. In related news, snapshots of the Vaadin4Spring integration that Petter and I are working on are now published on Sonatype's repository - enjoy!
14. Our pal Eberhard Wolff is back, and this time he's written up a nice (German-language) post on Spring 4.0 and Spring Boot, among (many) other things
15. David Williams blog, A Time-to-Value Story with Cloud Foundry, is thought-provoking: how quickly can a technology deliver value - measurable value?
16. Martin Fowler has started watching the micro services space. Nothing to report, specifically. This is just a page I'd recommend watching.
17. Layer 7, a CA technologies company, has just released results of a survey focused on API design and deployment. There are many takeaways from the survey, so be sure to read it, but one thing I thought particularly promising: a predicted growth in Hypermedia-aware APIs among API developers. If you're interested in embracing hypermedia, and the design pattern HATEOAS, I would encourage you to check out Spring HATEOAS and - if you'd like to learn more about using Spring HATEOAS and Spring Boot, check out this tutorial and adjoining code.

Spring Boot 1.0 RC4 just dropped and 1.0 can't be too far behind, and there are all sort of cool features coming!

One of the many questions I get around this concerns deployment strategies for Boot applications. Spring Boot builds on top of Spring and serves wherever Spring can serve. It enjoys Spring's portability. Spring Boot lets the developer focus on the application's development first, and removes the need to be overly concerned with every other aspect of its lifecycle, including deployment and management.

It aims to be production ready, out of the box. As part of this, Spring Boot does a few things differently, by default, that may be at first alien to some. In this post, I hope to briefly cover some of the common strategies for deploying a Spring Boot applications. I'll ever so briefly introduce it, and some sample code, before we dive deeper. Feel free to skip this section and start at the Embedded Web Server Deployment…

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 Batch and Boot co-founder Dr. Dave Syer has announced that Spring Boot RC4 is now available. Check out the latest cut for all the goodies!
2. There is a new guide that details how to use Spring Data REST
3. Spring Data ninja Christoph Strobl has announced that Spring Data Redis 1.2 is now available.
4. Don't miss Mattias Arthursson on a webinar March 18th, presenting Spring LDAP 2.0.0.
5. Join Juergen Hoeller and the Spring Team for a webinar on Java 8 and Spring Framework 4.0 on March 25!
6. David Turanski has put together a nice post on how to use Groovy for bean configuration
7. Alvaro Videla's and Jan Machacek's talk from SpringOne2GX 2013, RabbitMQ is the new King, is now available online
8. Gary Russell's SpringOne2GX 2013 talk introducing Spring Integration's internals is now online
9. Pance Cavkovski has a nice post demonstrating the web socket support from the JavaWebSocket project, Java EE 7 and Spring 4.
10. Norris Shelton Jr. has a nice post on accessing the Spring Security principal from the currently installed Authentication object using a custom annotation
11. Quinten Krijger has a nice post on how to manage session concurrency with Spring Security and Spring MVC
12. Tomasz Nurkiewicz writes about how to build a custom Spring XML namespace. He makes a great point at the beginning, though: Spring doesn't require XML!
13. The Not Just Another Blog blog looks at how to override the Spring Security filter chain
14. Thys Michels has a short-and-sweet post on how to configure a Spring application using Java configuration to consume an ElasticSearch service on Heroku.

This post is intended to introduce the Groovy Bean Builder to Java developers as a powerful alternative or supplement to Java @Configuration and XML configuration. The Spring Framework release 4.0 includes a port of the Grails Bean Builder to the core Spring Framework, providing a Groovy DSL for configuring Spring applications. Groovy and Grails developers are no doubt familiar with configuring Spring applications this way and I expect the rest of you are already thinking "How cool is that?"

Don't worry if you're not a Groovy expert. Just as many Java programmers use another popular Groovy DSL, Gradle, to build applications, you only need to know some basic syntax to get started. Sample code is available on github…

Hot on the heels of Spring Data's Codd GA release, there is a new Getting Started guide for Spring Data REST, Accessing Data with REST. It shows you how to create up an application with a JPA backend and a RESTful, hypermedia-driven front end.

Spring Data REST does all the heavy lifting of building a powerful RESTful front end as well as writing the JPA queries for the back end. To top it off, the guide leverages Spring Boot so you are using the latest-and-greatest from the Spring team.

Cheers!

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring.

Yesterday I was in Atlanta, GA for the amazing DevNexus conference talking to developers about the latest and greatest in the wide world of Spring, and about REST API development with Spring. Today I am in Montreal, Canada, for the ConFoo conference. I'll speak to developers this week about Spring's rich NoSQL and big-data support and building REST APIs with Spring.

As usual, we've got a lot to cover, so let's get into it!

1. Spring Batch lead Michael Minella has announced that Spring Batch 3.0 M3 is now available. My favorite new feature? It implements all of the required pieces for JSR 352, the Batch JSR! Congratulations Michael and team, this is a huge milestone!
2. Spring Mobile lead Roy Clarkson has announced that Spring Mobile 1.1.1 is now available.
3. Spring Security lead Rob Winch announced that Spring Security 3.2.1, and 3.1.5, are now available
4. Rob also announced that Spring LDAP 2.0.1 is now available.
5. Christoph Strobl has announced that Spring Data Redis 1.2.0 is now available, also!
6. Join Juergen Hoeller and the Spring Team to learn about Java 8 and Spring Framework 4.0 on March 25.
7. Don't miss Mattias Arthursson on March 18th, presenting Spring LDAP 2.0.0.
8. Tomcat fans should check out the webinar replay from Apache Committer Stuart Williams and Daniel Mikusa: Introduction to Apache Tomcat 8.
9. The replay of the Spring Data Community Lightning Talks from SpringOne2GX 2013 are now up
10. The replay of the SpringOne2GX 2013 talk, _SpringOne2GX 2013 Replay: Researching Cancer In the Cloud Using Spring, Neo4J, Mongo and Redis _
11. Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke has announced that Spring Data Codd is now available and GA! Check out the latest and greatest bits!
12. The latest cut of the Axon CQRS framework, version 2.1, is now available.
13. Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz has penned a nice post on the formation of a foundation around Cloud Foundry
14. El Reg also has a nice post on the recent formation of the Cloud Foundry foundation in a post titled, Cloud Foundry laps up attention in EMC, IBM, HP, Rackspace, SAP, VMware love-in.
15. The Zoltan blog has a nice post on using two-factor authentication with Spring Security
16. Biju Kunjummen on the the Java Code Geek's blog has put together a nice nice post on his first steps with Spring Boot and Spring Integration.
17. Xavier Padró' has published his followup post to last week's post introducing Spring and Thymeleaf. The new post looks at how to build a form, and how to use Ajax with Thymeleaf.
18. Speaking of Spring Boot, the OpenCredo blog has a nice post on their first steps with Spring Boot, as well! Check it out.
19. JavaLobby has a nice post on using custom ViewResolvers with Spring MVC.