Dear Spring Community,

We're pleased to announce the new release 2.7.0 of the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS).

Some highlights from this release:

• Ships on top of Eclipse Indigo (3.7)
• Includes Mylyn 3.6 and EGit 1.0
• Updated template projects
• Support for Grails 1.4.M1
• Grails-aware rename type refactoring
• Groovy-Eclipse 2.5.1, which includes support for Groovy 1.8 and DSL IDE support (DSLDs)
• Support for Gradle

More details on new features and bug fixes can be found in the New and Noteworthy document. Detailed installation instructions are also available.

As always downloads are available from the STS download page.

Dear Spring Community,

I'm pleased to announce that the 1.5.0 GA release of Spring BlazeDS Integration, the open source solution for building Spring-powered RIAs with Adobe Flex, is now available.

Download | Reference Documentation | JavaDocs | Changelog

This release includes just a few bug-fixes needed since the release candidate. To recap from the previous milestone releases, the major features included in 1.5.0 are:

• Enhanced AMF serialization support, with proper handling of Hibernate lazy properties and collections, the option to use direct field mapping instead of property-based mapping, and support for specifying alternate constructors to default no-arg constructor.
  
  
• A major refactoring of the Spring Security support, resulting in easier integration of Flex apps with various Spring Security features such as Remember Me, Session Fixation Protection, and Concurrent Session Control.
  
  
• Easier customization and namespace-supported configuration of framework-provided services such as the LoginCommand and MessageInterceptors.
  
  
• Support for reading and writing AMF content with RESTful Spring MVC @Controllers. This serves as a nice alternative to the direct RPC approach of the Remoting Service, reducing duplication of effort in applications that need to support multiple client types. (See the updated Test Drive for usage examples.)
  
  
• Upgraded minimum dependencies to Spring 3.0, BlazeDS 4.0, Spring Security 3.0, and Spring Integration 2.0
  
  
• A complete revision of the Maven-based Test Drive samples, including an update across the board to use Flex 4, and a new sample to demonstrate the RESTful programming model.

As always, I encourage anyone interested to get involved by trying out the release and giving us feedback in the community forum and Jira. We continually get great feedback from people having success with Spring BlazeDS Integration in their projects, and we look forward to hearing more about your experiences.

Jeremy Grelle
Spring Flex Lead

We are pleased to announce that Spring AMQP for Java 1.0 RC2 is now available.

For details about the changes since RC1, please review the Release Notes here

In addition to a few bug fixes, this release provides the following:

• Support for Exchange-to-Exchange bindings as well as custom Exchange types
• Improved re-connection support
• Added ChannelListener callback
• Clarified Binding builder API semantics
• Added a MessageProperties conversion strategy interface
• Improved namespace coverage (e.g. <rabbit:template>)
• Upgraded to RabbitMQ client version 2.5.0

Since this is intended to be our final pre-GA release, please take some time to try it out. In fact if you have a chance, really try to push the limits so that we know we're ready for prime time.

Thanks!
The Spring AMQP Team

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the first release candidate of the Spring Social project is now available!

The Spring Social project allows you to connect your Java applications to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as Facebook and Twitter.

This release includes:

• Additions to the Facebook API binding such as photo and video upload, Facebook page support, and Facebook search.
• Expansion of the Twitter API binding to include mobile notifications, blocking, and geo location operations.
• Implicit sign up support enabling automatic sign up of a user from a connection.
• A new quickstart showing how to get up and running quickly.
• Numerous bug fixes and other improvements based on user feedback (see the changelog for details).

Also, with this release we have extracted the provider modules (Twitter, Facebook, etc) into their own projects so they can progress at a separate schedule from the main Spring Social project. Coinciding with the release of Spring Social 1.0.0.RC1, Spring Social Twitter and Facebook 1.0.0.RC1 are also now available.

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 (recently updated for 1.0.0.RC1). 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.

It is awesome to see the community interest in extending Spring Social to work with numerous SaaS providers. Check out Matt Wright's work on Instagram and Foursquare and Morten Andersen-Gott's Yammer extension. Work on LinkedIn, Github, TripIt, and Gowalla has also started. We're committed to working with the community to build an ecosystem of quality Spring Social extensions. If you're integrating a SaaS API into your application, consider contributing to the Spring Social project. Have a look at our guide to extending Spring Social and discuss with the development team at our forum.

As we push toward a GA release, we would like to hear you think of the RC1 release. Participate 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!

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that a new milestone release (1.1.0.M1) of the Spring Data Graph project with Neo4j support is now available!

The primary goal of the Spring Data project is to make it easier to build Spring-powered applications that use new data access technologies such as non-relational databases, map-reduce frameworks, and cloud based data services.

The Graph Neo4j module provides integration with the Neo4j graph database. Back in 2010, Rod Johnson and Emil Eifrem started brainstorming about Spring and Neo4j integration including transparent persistence and…

Dear Spring Community,

I'm pleased to announce that we just released the second milestone build for the next release of the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS).

This milestone brings mostly new features for the Cloud Foundry support and Groovy&Grails developers, including:

• Improved Cloud Foundry support
• Support for Grails 1.4
• Grails aware Rename Type Refactoring
• Improved content assist for GSPs
• Improved Gradle support

More details can be found in the New and Noteworthy for 2.7.0.M2 document. Detailed installation instructions are also available, please look at the installation from the milestone update sites.

As always downloads are available from the STS download page, check "Other Downloads".

The release is planned for the beginning of July…

The second and final milestone of Spring 3.1 is now available from our http://maven.springframework.org/milestone Maven repository or for direct download from our community download page. This release includes new features such as:

• Code equivalents for Spring's XML namespaces
• Builder-style APIs for code-based Hibernate configuration
• TestContext framework support for @Configuration classes and bean definition profiles
• Support for injection against non-standard JavaBeans setters
• Support for Servlet 3 code-based configuration of Servlet container
• Support for Servlet 3 MultipartResolver
• JPA EntityManagerFactory bootstrapping without persistence.xml
• New HandlerMethod-based Support Classes For Annotated Controller Processing
• Consumes and Produces @RequestMapping Conditions
• Working With URI Template Variables In Controller Methods
• Validation For @RequestBody Method Arguments

See the New Features and Enhancements in Spring 3.1 section of the reference documentation for more information

Stay tuned to the SpringSource Blog over the coming week for a series of posts covering what's new in 3.1.0.M2.

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'm pleased to announce that the 1.5.0.RC1 release candidate of Spring BlazeDS Integration, the open source solution for building Spring-powered RIAs with Adobe Flex, is now available.

Download | Reference Documentation | JavaDocs | Changelog

This release is largely focused on stabilization of the new features introduced in the previous milestones. Significant attention has been paid to maturing the refactored Spring Security 3 support and the Hibernate AMF serialization support. New annotations such as @AmfIgnore and @AmfCreator allow deeper customization of the AMF conversion process, and this enhanced AMF support has now been made generally available for application to any object type, not just those persisted with Hibernate.

As always, I encourage anyone interested to get involved by trying out the release and giving us feedback in the community forum and Jira, as we are expecting only a short break before the release of 1.5.0.GA. We continually get great feedback from people having success with Spring BlazeDS Integration in their projects, and we look forward to hearing more about your experiences.

Jeremy Grelle
Spring Flex Lead

Dear Spring Community,

I am pleased to announce that the Milestone 3 release of the Spring Data Document 1.0 project with MongoDB support is now available! The primary goal of the Spring Data project is to make it easier to build Spring-powered applications that use new data access technologies such as non-relational databases, map-reduce frameworks, and cloud based data services.

The MongoDB module provides integration with the MongoDB document database.

Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog

To learn more about the project, visit the Spring Data MongoDB Page.

The changes…