Dear Spring Community,

we are happy to announce a minor maintenance release of our Eclipse-based tooling today: The Spring Tool Suite (STS) 3.5.1 and the Groovy/Grails Tool Suite (GGTS) 3.5.1.

This maintenance release includes a number of bug fixes as well as a few updates, including:

• added Java8 support for faceted web projects
• updated Maven Integration for Eclipse to support Java8
• m2e-egit connector now included by default
• Grails updated to 2.3.8
• the Groovy 2.3 compiler now availabe from the dashboard (including early support for Grails 2.4M2 in GGTS)

Both tool suites ship on top of the latest Eclipse Kepler SR2 release.

To download the distributions, please go visit:

• Spring Tool Suite: https://spring.io/tools/sts/all
• Groovy/Grails Tool Suite: https://spring.io/tools/ggts/all

Detailed new and noteworthy notes can be found here: STS/GGTS 3.5.1 New & Noteworthy.

The next version 3.6.0 is scheduled to arrive in July 2014, shortly after the Eclipse Luna (4.4) release. The first milestone build is scheduled to arrive in late May 2014.

Enjoy!

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Los Angeles, speaking to large companies who are looking at building their next-generation architectures on top of Spring and Spring Boot, in particular. Oh, I also go to visit the super cool Pivotal Los Angeles office!

• Spring Data Hadoop ninja Thomas Risberg (who, by the way, was one of the original authors on JdbcTemplate, among his many other claims to fame!) has just announced Spring for Hadoop 2.0.RC3. The new release grows the set of supported Hadoop distributions and includes support for YARN, which you can see in action in some of our Getting Started Guides.
• Spring Integration 4.0 is a major upgrade - the new 4.0 release offers full support for Annotations and Java Configuration + some Spring Boot support! With 4.0, you'll be able to make XML - free integration applications. Join project lead Gary Russell taking you through all the new hotness in the webinar, Spring Integration 4.0, the new frontier, on May 13.
• Spring Framework 4.0.4 is a maintenance release with some minor dependency updates, and is recommended. Update the version and mvn clean install/gradle package now!
• The new Spring Data release, Spring Data Dijkstra RC1 (named for Edsger W. Dijkstra), is finally here, and packed full of awesome features! One of my personal favorites is the ability to return Java 8 Optional values in a repository. I put together an example here. The new release train is huge, and includes a few (historically exclusively community-driven) modules like Spring Data Cassandra, Spring Data Solr, and Spring Data Couchbase. Don't miss it!
• The new 3.5.1 release of the Spring and Groovy/Grails Tool Suites are now available. The new releases are packed with new features, updates and a new baseline so check out the release notes.
• Groovy 2.3 is here! (just go read and download, now!)
• The amazing, and sleepless (I'm sure of it! Just look at the blogs he's released!), Rob Winch just announced the first milestone of Spring Security 4.0.0 featuring testing support.
• Spring HATEOAS 0.11 is now available, and features an API for client-side service traversal called Traverson.
• Spring Data Neo4j lead Michael Hunger and I will be giving a webinar on the new awesome in Spring Data Neo4j 3.0 and Neo4j 2.0 on May 20th.
• Not skipping a beat, Xavier Padró has put together a very nice post on using Spring Integration's Java API.
• Spring framework ninja Stéphane Nicoll has just put up a nice blog post introducing the annotation-driven JMS support in the upcoming Spring framework 4.1.
• Want to learn more about Neo4j and Spring Data Neo4J? There's a nice little tutorial on JavaBeat about Spring Data Neo4j. The English is a little choppy and the code examples are garbled with noise, but I think you should still be able to get the gist of it. If you want a more contemporary, Java-centric alternative, check out these guides on using Spring Data Neo4j and using Spring Data Neo4j with Spring Data REST
• If that's still not enough Neo4j, if you're in the Bay Area, then you might want to checkout the meetup that Spring Data Neo4J lead Michael Hunger (and I) will be holding this Thursday, May 8th!
• My pal Andy Piper and I gave a talk at SpringOne2GX 2013 about running and writing Spring applications on Cloud Foundry. Check it out!
• Scott Frederick and Cornelia Davis introduce how to add custom services and runtimes to Cloud Foundry in this amazing talk from SpringOne2GX 2013.
• Did you check out the new Project Reactor release? The new release is packed with cool stuff (including API improvements, a general-purpose object pool and a lot more!) and it paves the way for Reactor 2.0, which will base its Promise and Streams support on the Reactive Streams proejct. Nice!
• Phil Whelan over on the ActiveState blog has a nice post introducing buildpacks. Buildpacks came from Heroku, but of course you can use them in Cloud Foundry and - as with ActiveState's own Stackato project - they work with projects that are built on Cloud Foundry.

I'm pleased to announce the release of Spring Security 4.0.0.M1 available in the Spring Milestone repository. The primary component of this first milestone is testing support. Stay tuned to the spring.io blog for a blog series introducing the test support. If you can't wait to try it out, see the tests in the showcase package which demonstrate some of the highlights.

Reference | Javadoc | Guides

Spring Framework 4.0 introduced a new spring-messaging module, adding a selection of Spring Integration types such as the core Message abstraction. Spring 4.1 aligns its JMS support to allow you to benefit from that abstraction. But before diving into that, I'd like to show you in details how we further improved the infrastructure for listener endpoints.

Annotation-driven listener endpoints

You are probably used to the <xyz:annotation-driven> element or the @Enable* counterpart and perhaps you were looking for something similar for JMS. Look no further: the next major release of the Spring…

We are pleased to announce the 4.0.0.RELEASE version of Spring Integration is now available.

The artifacts are available in the Spring repository (repo.spring.io/release) and Maven Central now.

The new features have been covered in some depth in the Milestone 4 and Release Candidate announcements (including Spring Boot examples) but, to summarize:

• Requires Spring Framework 4.0.3 or above
• Greatly expanded annotation support for configuring integration flows, laying the groundwork for the Java DSL which is in progress in the extensions repo
• New endpoints, and more...

For changes since the release candidate, see the GA release notes…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! Last week I finished an absolutely lovely time in Bangalore, India, and yesterday I popped into Leuven, Belgium at the insanely poplar Devoxx conference founder Stephan Janssen's invitation for a quick visit to the Belgium Java User Group where I got to hang out with some absolutely amazingly enthusiastic locals and, of course, my pal and Spring framework committer Stéphane Nicoll. Naturally, the video of the whole thing should be up on Parleys at some point soon, too!

Let's dive right into it!

1. Spring Social co-founder and lead Craig Walls has just announced the long awaited Spring Social 1.1.0 release! This new release is fantastic! If you've been following the pre-release cuts over the last year and a half, then you'll know there's been some deep rethinking on how to easily expose Spring Social's Java configuration. The final release is both concise and general purpose. I am super excited to see this and will begin updating my various Spring Social-powered OAuth clients accordingly! VERY nice job, Craig!
2. Did you see the new "minor" Spring Boot release, 1.0.2? I use quotes because, with Spring Boot, even the minor releases pack a punch! Dr. Syer announced the release and pointed out - among other things - the fancy new @IntegrationTest annotation. Awesome! (now excuse me while I go update my Boot projects...)
3. Join me and Ashley Puls from New Relic tomorrow April 30th as we track and trace our way through a Javascript (frontend) and Java/Spring (backend) application.
4. Spring Integration is looking at an incredible new release -- full support for Annotations and Java Configuration + some Spring Boot support! With 4.0, you'll be able to make XML - free integration applications. Project lead Gary Russell taking you through all the new hotness in the webinar, Spring Integration 4.0, the new frontier, on May 13.
5. Spring Data Neo4j lead Michael Hunger and I will be giving a webinar on the new awesome in Spring Data Neo4j 3.0 and Neo4j 2.0 on May 20th.
6. Continuing the series on Project Sagan, Spring framework ninja Brian Clozel has just written up a very nice look at how Project Sagan does client-side JavaScript. This is a great look at what modern, client-side applications look like with npm, grunt, and gulp. Best part? The content is delivered as a video! Perfect!
7. Spring Roo has a major contributor in DISID! Check out this great post from my pal Pieter Humphrey on the future of Spring Roo.
8. Get 90 minutes with Chris Richardson at SpringOne2GX 2013 as he discusses futures in Java, Scala and Javascript. And no, we don't mean product roadmaps. Check out his session titled: Futures and Rx Observables: powerful abstractions for consuming web services asynchronously.
9. You you still think that Spring is just for dependency injection? Join Mark Secrist for an amazing and revealing look at fundamental concepts like the underlying design patterns, and building blocks of the framework - highly reusable insights. Watch the replay of his SpringOne2GX 2013 session: Going beyond Dependency Injection.
10. Xavier Padró put together a nice post on how to use Spring Integration to configure a timeout when acting as a web-service client
11. IntelliJ ninja Andrey Cheptsov has put together a lovely post on how to use the Jetbrains-originated language Kotlin, the NoSQL database MongoDB, Spring Boot, and the PaaS Heroku together. Nice!
12. Petri Kainulainen is back at it again, this time with a great post on using jOOQ - which makes working with SQL easier - along with Spring to handle paging and sorting.
13. Roger Hughes has a cool post on tracking exceptions with Spring's Quartz scheduling support.
14. There are some nice posts on the Time is running out, don't lose it. blog. The first one of note is this post on a weird ClassNotFoundException that presents itself on older versions of Spring Integration on JBoss EAP 6.2
15. The second, slightly older, post is on using the Spring Integration MQTT adapter to communicate with MQTT-powered services. MQTT is a lightweight messaging protocol that is at the heart of many internet-of-things based solutions today. Who knows? Your refrigerator might be using it! :)
16. Want to run a more production-like Hadoop instance on your local machine? Don't want to run a full virtual machine? Check out this post on deploying Pivotal's HD Hadoop distro using Docker! (and then, check out Spring for Hadoop and Spring XD!)

Now that we know a bit more about JavaScript modules, we're ready to dive into the client-side architecture of the Sagan application.

Note: If you haven't read previous blog posts on the Sagan project, you should know that this is the Spring reference application that powers this blog and everything else at spring.io. Previous posts showed out to run this application, how we do zero downtime deployments and also how we upgraded Sagan to use the latest JDK8 features.

In this post, I want to walk through the basics of the client-side architecture in the Sagan application:

1. Why is the client application in a separate sagan-client project module?
2. How is it linked with the sagan-site module?
3. What are npm, bower and gulp?
4. How do those tools work together to make the client application?
…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Bangalore, India, for the Great Indian Developer Summit talking to developers about (wait for it..) Spring! I also met with a large system integrator here in Bangalore's Electronic City and addressed a large team of architects and engineers using Spring on projects worldwide. India's an interesting place because so much of their business comes from companies abroad who are trying to get extra help on otherwise overwhelming projects. Naturally, anything that helps get more done, quicker, is of interest here and Spring's a favorite. Needless to say, Spring Boot resonated a lot! It's not all work, though, when the local food is as good as it is here! :)

Lots of webinars and replays this week - we've got a lot to cover, so let's get to it!

• Hadoop hungry? Get ready for a feast - Dr. Mark Pollack and the XD team have announced that Spring XD 1.0.0 M6 is now available. This new release has a TON of new features, including support running on YARN, Zookeeper support for the DIRT distributed runtime, machine-learning algorithms, improved shell tab-completion, a Reactor-powered TCP/UDP source that can do 1M+ tx/sec on cheap hardware, default FTP to HDFS job, and much more! (No, really, we mean that). This release felt more like they somehow skipped all the 1.0.x milestones and released a "2.0" version!
• Reactor project lead Jon Brisbin has announced, along with other engineers at Typesafe, Netflix, Twitter, and more, the new common API for reactive stream processing. This is huge!
• Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke has just announced that Spring Data Codd, service release 2, is now available. This new release is huge, so be sure to check them all out!
• Dr. Dave Syer has just announced the release of Spring Security OAuth 2.0.0.RC1. This project has evolved very quickly, and I've enjoyed updating the code to my talk, The Spring REST Stack, to use the progressively more concise and powerful iterations. I've updated that branch (still updating unit tests) to use Spring Security 2.0.0.RC1. It's a working OAuth-secured REST service that supports HTTP and HTTPS, can run standalone or as a traditional .war, and uses a custom UserDetailsService bean and Java 8 lambdas. Not bad!
• Spring Integration is looking at an incredible new release -- full support for Annotations and Java Configuration + some Spring Boot support! With 4.0, you'll be able to make XML - free integration applications. Project lead Gary Russell taking you through all the new hotness in the webinar, Spring Integration 4.0, the new frontier, on May 13.
• On April 30th, join me and Ashley Puls from New Relic as we track and trace our way through a Javascript (frontend) and Java/Spring (backend) application.
• Chris Beams has put together another great post on the Sagan project, this one on moving to Java 8. Check it out!
• The replay for my recent talk, Building "Bootiful" Applications with Spring Boot, is now available on our YouTube channel.
• Spring Security lead Rob Winch is back with another post on advanced Spring MVC test integrations with common third party projects. This post is about testing web applications using Geb.
• Spring Data Neo4j lead Michael Hunger and I will be giving a webinar on the new awesome in Spring Data Neo4j 3.0 and Neo4j 2.0 on May 20th.
• Search on the brain? You have front row seats to 90 minutes with our former colleague and Spring committer Costin Leau, now at Elasticsearch: Your Data, Your Search, Elasticsearch.
• Don't miss Pivotal's Mike Wiesner as he tackles pragmatic Application Security (beyond just spring security) in this SpringOne2GX 2013 Replay: Application Security Pitfalls.
• Groovy language lead Guillaume LaForge's epic Groovy Weekly column is coming along nicely! There's always good stuff, and this week's no exception. Check it out if you dig all things Groovy (and Grails).
• This project, by Alexandre Rafalovitch, aims to improve the SOLR JavaDocs. There's a lot to admire here, but I liked this Spring Boot example which demonstrates a REST endpoint connected to a SOLR instance. Nice!
• Fabio Maffioletti has put together a very nice post that evolves the discussion on how to use JTA with Spring (in particular, with Spring Boot and Spring Data JPA) via Atomikos to coordinate transactions across two different databases. This post starts with an older post I wrote in 2011 on the same topic, introduces Spring Boot and Spring Data, and changes the example from one database and a JMS broker to a database and another database through JPA. This is really cool!
• Yuan Ji has been putting together very nice posts on building HAL-compliant REST services with Spring HATEOAS, unit testing them and - most recently - consuming those services with Angular-HAL.
• Our pal Brian Hannaway is back, this time with a post on building Spring Batch applications. The content is really good, and worth a read for anybody who wants to love and learn Spring Batch. In the post, Brian demonstrates how to build a Batch application using the XML namespace. Spring Batch also supports a very nice Java configuration API and - with Spring Boot - writing a Spring Batch application can be very concise. I took Brian's very cool example and wrote a different version using Spring Boot and the Java configuration API for reference. Definitely start with Brian's blog, though, as the code in my repository will make little sense otherwise!

As I'm sure most readers are aware, Java SE 8 was released last month. In conjunction with the recent release of STS 3.5.0 and its complete support for JDK 8, we thought now would be an ideal time to upgrade Sagan to take advantage of the new language features and APIs.

Note: Not yet familiar with the Sagan project? It's the Spring reference application that powers this blog and everything else at spring.io. Check out the first three posts in this series for more details.

Cloud Foundry's Java buildpack has provided support for JDK 8 since the day it was released. To begin using it, we've created our own fork of the buildpack, bumped the JDK version from 1.7.0 to 1.8.0, and configured our Gradle build…