There are less than two weeks to save $200 off the registration for SpringOne 2GX 2011! SpringOne 2GX is a one-of-a-kind conference for application developers, solution architects, web operations and IT teams who develop business applications, create multi-device aware web applications, design cloud architectures, and manage high performance infrastructure. The sessions are specifically tailored for developers using the Spring technologies, Groovy & Grails, and Tomcat. The recent releases of Platform as a Service solutions from multiple vendors (including VMware's Cloud Foundry technology) will be a central focus of many of the technical sessions and will provide developers with the optimal blueprints for the cloud. Whether you're building and running mission-critical business applications or designing the next killer cloud application, SpringOne 2GX will keep you up to date with the latest enterprise technology.

Be sure to register today to lock in this $200 discount.

Spring enables you to focus on your business problem rather than the plumbing that connects components and systems. Take a tour of Spring’s key features from the core framework to infrastructure and data services and learn how to build, run and manage your modern Java applications. Getting started is easy and you can do it now.

Spring Framework Features

The Spring Framework helps you build Java Applications faster because it allows you to focus on your business problem rather than the plumbing code that connects components and systems. The features of Spring include:

Spring Key Benefits

Modularity Plain old Java Objects keep your code concise, simple and modular

Productivity Over 70% of developers report productivity gains and reduction in time to deploy with Spring

Portability Applications run on Tomcat, all Java EE servers as well as cloud platforms

Testability Cleanly expressed dependencies make unit and integration testing easier

We are pleased to announce that Spring AMQP 1.0 GA (for Java) has been released! You can find links to all of the resources (documentation, samples, source code, forum, issue tracker, etc) at the Spring AMQP Home Page. The artifacts are available in the SpringSource Maven repository as well as Maven Central.

This project has been extremely popular during its milestone and release-candidate phases, and we would like to thank those of you in the community who have provided valuable feedback and raised JIRA issues along the way. We are looking forward to watching the community grow even more now…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce the 1.0.0.RC3 release of Spring Social, including the 1.0.0.RC3 releases of Spring Social Facebook and Spring Social Twitter. Spring Social lets you connect your Java applications to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as Facebook and Twitter.

This release includes fixes for bugs reported since 1.0.0.RC2, as well as a few improvements:

• ConnectInterceptor implementations can now add parameters to the authorization URL.
• Twitter TimelineOperations.updateStatus() improvements:
  • Photos can now be uploaded along with a status update.
  • TimelineOperations.updateStatus() now returns a Tweet object for the newly posted tweet.
  • A status can now be posted as being a reply to an existing status.
• The set of sample applications has been updated, including two new examples: One to demonstrate a popup-based connection flow and another to demonstrate using Spring Social within a Facebook Canvas application.

See the change logs for more information on what's new in this release (Core | Facebook | Twitter)

To get the software, download the release distribution (Core | Facebook | Twitter) or simply add the maven artifacts to your project. To see it live, run through the quickstart and spin up the showcase app (updated for 1.0.0.RC3). Supplement as you go with information from the reference manual.

Spring Social requires Spring Framework 3.0.5 or > to run. We recommend Spring 3.1 for new applications to take advantage of the latest advances in the core framework. See the reference manual for a full description of dependencies.

We expect this to be the last release candidate for Spring Social 1.0.0 and anticipate a Spring Social 1.0.0 GA release very soon. For that reason, we urge you to try out this release candidate and give us feedback in the forum or, if you have any suggestions or find any bugs, post them in the issue tracker.

We hope you enjoy using Spring Social!

With so much of the focus on the new features in Spring 3.1, it is important to remember that the 3.0.x branch is still being updated. Sneaking in under the radar last week, we saw the release of Spring 3.0.6. This release addresses over 50 minor issues and includes about a dozen small improvements. Be sure to read the Change Log for all the details.

Download | Documentation | Javadoc API | Change Log | JIRA

Don't forget that Spring users can ask questions in the community forum and identify issues in JIRA as well.

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce a new milestone release 2.7.0.M4 of the Cloud Foundry Integration for the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). This milestone release includes support for the just released Micro Cloud Foundry and allows you to register users directly from within your IDE. In addition to that the milestone includes a number of fixes and improvements to existing features.

Installation instructions and a quick guide for the tooling is available from the SpringSource Team Blog: Using Cloud Foundry from STS.

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the second release (1.1.0.RELEASE) of the Spring Data Graph project with Neo4j support is now available!

After the first public release of Spring Data Graph in April 2011 we mainly focused on user feedback.

With the improved documentation around the tooling and an upgraded AspectJ version we addressed many of the AspectJ issues that where reported by users. With the latest STS and Eclipse and hopefully with Idea11 it is possible to develop Spring Data Graph applications without the red wiggles. To further ease the development we also provided sample build scripts for ant/ivy and a plugin for gradle.

Of course we kept pace with development of Neo4j, currently using the latest stable release of Neo4j (1.4.1).

During the last months of Neo4j development the improved querying (Cypher, Gremlin) support was one of the important aspects. So we strove to support it on all levels. Now, it is possible to execute Cypher queries from Spring Data Graph Repositories, from the Neo4j-Template but also as part of dynamic field annotations and via the introduced entity methods. The same goes for Gremlin scripts. What's possible with this new expressive power? Let's take a look.

For example, in a repository:

	public interface PersonRepository extends GraphRepository, NamedIndexRepository {
	
	    @Query("start team=(%team) match (team)-[:persons]->(member) return member")
	    Iterable findAllTeamMembers(@Param("team") Group team);
	
	    @Query(value = "g.v(team).out('persons')", type = QueryType.Gremlin)
	    Iterable findAllTeamMembersGremlin(@Param("team") Group team);
	}

The Neo4j Template API got a complete overhaul which resulted in much fewer, more focused methods. The advanced query result handling capabilities (type conversion, mapping, single results, handler, etc.) are now implemented using a more fluent API. This new API is available for all types of queries, whether index lookups, graph traversals, Cypher queries or Gremlin scripts.

	template.query("start n=(0) match n-->m return m", null).to(Node.class);
template.execute("g.v(0).out", null).to(Node.class);

template.lookup("relationship", "name", "rel1").to(String.class, new PropertyContainerNameConverter()).single();

template.traverse(referenceNode, traversalDescription).handle(new Handler<Path>() {
            public void handle(Path value) {
                final String name = (String) value.endNode().getProperty("name", "");
                resultSet.add(name…

Dear Spring Community,

Dear Spring Community,