Dear Spring-NOSQL Community,

The new Release Candidate 1 of Spring Data - Neo4j comes with a number of long requested improvements and additions.

First of all, SDN has been updated to Neo4j 1.7.GA which includes operational improvements and new grammar to the Cypher graph query language. To complement the added language features, this release of SDN integrates a new version of the cypher-dsl with an improved API.

By popular request, support for not only unique node entities but also for relationships is now available. This works using either the remote REST-Server or an embedded Neo4j database…

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the first milestone release 3.0.0.M1 of the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS).

Highlights from this milestone include:

• the distribution now ships on top of the Eclipse Juno M6 (4.2M6) packages.
• updated to tc Server 2.6.5
• some improvements around Spring-related content-assists and code templates
• Groovy 2.0 support
• Grails 2.0.3 support
• Java7 support for AspectJ/AJDT

Since the Eclipse Juno release in June will be based on the new Eclipse 4.2 platform (instead of the 3.x development stream), we decided to ship this milestone build of STS based on the latest Juno milestone builds instead of the latest Indigo SR2 release. We expect a lot of fixes in the Eclipse platform until the final Eclipse version ships in June, so some glitches that you might experience using this M1 build of STS will be fixed…

Dear Spring Community,

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

Spring Mobile provides extensions to Spring MVC that aid in the development of cross-platform mobile web applications.

Here is an overview of the new features and functionality:

• Tablets are no longer recognized as mobile devices
• Added support for resolving tablet devices in LiteDeviceResolver.
• Added a new DeviceType enumeration consisting of NORMAL, MOBILE, and TABLET values.
• The Device interface now includes isNormal(), and isTablet() methods in addition to the existing isMobile() method.
• WebOS devices are now recognized as a mobile device in LiteDeviceResolver
• Improved the SiteSwitcherHandlerInterceptor by adding an URL path alternative to "dotMobi" and "mDot" for site switching. The switcher is now capable of switching between "normal" and "mobile" URL paths within the same domain. For example an about page for a normal site may be "http://www.domain.com/about", and the mobile site may be "http://www.domain.com/m/about"
• You can now configure a list of "normal" User-Agent keywords in the LiteDeviceResolver. It may happen that a device is falsely identified as mobile. This list of keywords takes precedence over the mobile and tablet keywords, effectively overriding the default behavior.

See the changelog and reference manual for more information.

To retrieve the software, download the release distribution, or add the maven artifacts to your project. Sample apps are available at github.com/SpringSource/spring-mobile-samples

We want to thank Scott Rossillo for his contributions to this release, and we look forward to working with him and the rest of the Spring community on future releases. If you are building a mobile web app, we encourage you try out 1.0.0.RC2 and collaborate with us on the next iteration of the project.

The Spring Data team is pleased to announce the (initial) 1.0.0.M1 release of Spring Data REST.

This release contains a Servlet-based web application that can be used to export JPA Repositories over HTTP to create RESTful endpoints that user agents can access to manage your exposed JPA Entities. Browsers (via Javascript) or non-interactive agents like curl or wget can perform CRUD operations on entities, including managing relationships between entities through the use of Links.

Starter Web Application | Wiki | Release Notes

To learn more about the project, visit the Spring Data REST homepage, or visit the Github repository…

Dear Spring Community,

I am pleased to announce the GA release of Spring GemFire 1.1.1 project is now available!

Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog

To learn more about the project, visit the Spring GemFire Homepage.

1.1.1 is mainly a maintenance release providing several enhancements on the configuration front. See the changelog for more details.

In a press release today, SpringSource and VMware announced that the Spring 3.1 Release Train is complete. Spring Integration, Spring Security, Spring Batch, Spring Data, Spring Mobile and Spring for Android all now support Spring 3.1, making it easier and faster for enterprise developers to build the next generation of enterprise applications.

The press release also highlighted important findings from Evans Data Research regarding the growing popularity and benefits of using Spring. More than two thirds of Java developers are either using Spring today or plan to do so within the next two years and those that do use Spring are 50% more productive.

SpringSource would like to thank all of the amazing community members that made this release possible. Community contributions form an important part of many of the projects and all the users that experimented with milestone and release candidate versions help substantially in making sure that Spring technology is high quality and production ready. Work is already underway on many other exciting projects like the recently announced Spring for Apache Hadoop project. Community members are invited to attend the upcoming SpringOne on the Road events to meet the Spring experts and learn about the latest features available with Spring.

Dear Spring Community,

We're pleased to announce the new release 2.9.0 of the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). Some highlights from this release:

• ships now with just released Eclipse Indigo SR2 (3.7.2)
• updated to tc Server 2.6.3, Spring Roo 1.2.1, and Grails 2.0.1
• now includes an AspectJ 1.7.0 based AJDT
• support for Spring Integration 2.1
• support for Grails 2.0
• improved Gradle integration

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.

Looking ahead, STS 3.0.0 is planned for July 2012 and will be based on Eclipse Juno (4.2).

Dear Spring Community,

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

Spring for Android supports usage of the Spring Framework in a Android environment. The 1.0.0.RC1 release focuses on updating support for the latest Spring Social release in native Android applications, as well as providing enhancements to Rest Template. This includes:

• Support for Spring Social 1.0.2.RELEASE, and Spring Security 3.1.0.RELEASE through the Spring for Android Auth module, which includes a SQLite datastore for persisting OAuth API connections.
• Updated RestTemplate support, now at the level of Spring Framework 3.1.0.RELEASE.
• Added support for Basic Authentication.
• Added AssetResource for accessing static resources stored in the assets directory of an Android project.
• Removed automatic loading of GsonHttpMessageConverter due to incompatibilities with preinstalled versions of Gson on some devices.
• Improved gzip support in RestTemplate.
• Now defaulting to standard J2SE facilities (HttpURLConnection) in Gingerbread and newer, as recommended by Google.
• Disabled connection reuse on Eclair and older versions when using HttpURLConnection, because of a defect in connection pooling on those versions of Android.
• Added several additional bug fixes and improvements.

Spring for Android is supported in Android version 2.1 (API Level 7) and higher.

To get the software, download the release distribution, or simply add the maven artifacts to your project. To see the features live, check out the spring-android-showcase (updated for 1.0.0.RC1).

Dear Spring-NOSQL Community,

Since the last release of Spring Data - Neo4j we worked on a number of issues that you raised as important improvements and extensions.

Thanks to Mark Spitzler, Oliver Gierke, Rajaram Ganeshan, Laurent Pireyn for their contributions and all the other community members for the feedback and discussions.

We want to encourage you to give it a try, especially the new things and send us your feedback.

We are aware of the of issues that are still open and want to address them by the 2.1 release which is planned for the end of March - aligned with Neo4j 1.7.

If you have any questions or suggestions don't hesitate to ask on the Spring Forums, the Neo4j Google Group or by raising an issue in JIRA…