Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Krakow, Poland for Geecon, the Polish developer conference where, of course, I'll be speaking to developers about Spring. (and, maybe, Spring). If you're around, find me, I'll be wearing the giant Spring leaf t-shirt! :)

Other than that, there's a lot to get through so let's get to it!

• In preparation for the upcoming Spring IO Platform, Spring Data release train Dijkstra has been released! This is a tremendous release train that includes: JPA, MongoDB, Neo4J, Apache Solr, Couchbase, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Gemfire, Redis and Data REST! Congrats to the Spring Data Team!
• Spring Boot 1.1.0 M1 is now available and introduces MongoDB and Gemfire support, as well as improved actuator metrics and health endpoints.
• Final maintenance releases for the Spring Framework 3.2.x and 4.0.x versions are now available!
• Spring Integration ninja (rockstar!) Artem Bilan put together a nice post introducing all the amazing Java configuration support in the nascent Spring Integration Java configuration DSL, which builds upon the basic @EnableIntegration support available in the just-released Spring Integration 4.0. You should read that post. Seriously. I want to steal some of Artem's thunder by excerpting this one amazing code-snippet:

  java @Bean IntegrationFlow helloWorldFlow() { return IntegrationFlows.from("helloWorldInput") .filter("World"::equals) .transform("Hello "::concat) .handle(System.out::println) .get(); } Yep! That's a Spring Integration flow that handles input messages, filters them, transforms them, and then gives them to the escape-hatch method, handle, which lets the developer insert any behavior into the mix. Remember, you can change anything about this - including where it gets the messages from and where it writes the messages to. Indeed, the output of one flow could be the input to another. Congratulations, Spring Integration team! Also, make sure to check out the launch webinar replay!

• I know I mentioned this last week, but it's so worth a re-read! Groovy 2.3.0 is here! (Hah! Gotcha! This week's link was to a different post by the same author on the subject of the Groovy 2.3.0 release! But aren't you glad you read it, anyway?) Go, Groovy, go!
• My pal Pieter Humphrey has done a nice introductory screencast on Spring XD - showing how to get up and running doing stream processing, and wiring it to an analytics dashboard in less than 7 minutes. XD uses a deceptively simple DSL (domain specific language) and no Java code - it's never been easier to work with Hadoop.
• Spring Security lead Rob Winch has been moving heaven and earth to make unit-testing secure applications easier than ever. In this first installment of a new series, Rob looks at new annotations designed to stand in place of a live-fire Spring Security apparatus to mock a Principal, a UserDetailsService, and more. Check it out and stay tuned for more!
• Speaking of Rob Winch, he gave an epic introduction to Spring Security at SpringOne2GX 2013 last year. This is a perfect place to jump onboard if you're new to Spring Security.
• New Relic's Ashley Puls was kind enough to do a webinar with your humble author on Web Application Diagnostics using New Relic. Thanks, Ashley! I'll be very honest, this webinar was super informative for me. I knew just a little about New Relic, and in working through the development of the webinar I learned about a zillion and five use cases that are well served by New Relic. Really cool stuff!
• Also published this week - a SpringOne2GX 2013 Replay by Emad Benjamin and Guillermo Tantucho: Virtualizing and Tuning Large Scale Java Platforms. This goes over JVM memory tuning and all the tricks and tips for getting Java to run well on a virtualized environment.
• SpringOne2GX 2013 replay - a great talk from SAS Software: Migrating from WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss to Pivotal tcServer. This might go well with a recent post on why App Servers are dead by Eberhard Wolff.
• Do you love Spring's new home on the web, spring.io, as much as I do? Want to learn more? Check out this talk by project lead and Spring ninja Chris Beams on the makeup of the site, its development, and deployment.
• Last week, Spring Data Neo4j lead and graph-ninja Michael Hunger and I gave a talk on Spring Boot and Neo4j. This talk was fun for me because it gave me a lot of excuses to play with Neo4j. In point of fact, Michael and I are doing a webinar on about the same subject on the 20th of May (that's 7 days away!), so come see what we've come up with. In the meantime, you may want to check out this recent post on creating a time-tree with Cypher, the language that Michael works on that's used to drive interactions with Neo4j. That post was, of course, a response to another post that Michael put together on importing forests into Neo4j, also worth a read!
• I quite liked this post introducing how to setup a Spring Batch job using Spring Boot. The author found a comfortable configuration-middle ground in the Groovy BeanBuilder support, and describes it nicely in this post
• Moritz Schulze has put together a very nice post, following others in the series, on how to integration test REST services
• Are you using Spring Boot and want to use Spock? Netflix engineer Tomas Lin has put together an example on his GitHug page. Check it out!
• Jakub Kubrynski has put together a nice post on how to use Spring Boot's org.springframework.boot.actuate.system.ApplicationPidListener (which Jakub contributed - thanks Jakub!) - to work with the application's process identifier (PID). Nice!
• Meltdown 1.0.0 has been released! Meltdown is a Clojure interface to the Reactor project. So... functional programming and stream processing inside a lisp-like language? A dream! Check it out!

Today we are pleased to announce the release candidate for Spring Batch 3.0. This release of Spring Batch provides the support for JSR-352 we are committed to providing as well as a number of new features for our existing Spring Batch community.

Features in Release Candidate 1

The major features for this release include:

• JSR-352 support
• Promotion of Spring Batch Integration into Spring Batch
• Complete overhaul of dependencies
• Support for SQLite
• Job scope
• Switch from Maven to Gradle for building Spring Batch

JSR-352 Support

JSR-352 is the batch JSR and was released as 1.0 late last year. As Spring Batch served as the inspiration for much of the programming model of this JSR, Spring is committed to supporting it. With the 3.0 release, Spring Batch is compliant with JSR-352 passing all TCK tests. It provides the most production-tested implementation of the JSR.

Creating batch jobs that comply with the standards of this JSR should feel very familiar to users of Spring Batch. The XML configuration and interfaces are very similar to the existing Spring Batch. Below is an example JSR-352 batch job

Spring Batch's implementation of JSR-352 was developed to allow the most flexibility for existing Spring Batch users. We allow developers to use existing ItemReader, ItemProcessor, ItemWriters, etc in conjunction with the configuration facilities that JSR-352 provides. This provides developers a complete library of production-tested components for building robust batch jobs.

To read more about Spring Batch's implementation of JSR-352, visit our reference documentation here: http://docs.spring.io/spring-batch/trunk/reference/html/jsr-352.html

Promote Spring Batch Integration to Spring Batch

The line between when to use Spring Batch or Spring Integration is often a blurry one. There are many use cases where one works better than the other. However, there are also many use cases where they can be used together to build robust and scalable data processing systems. Spring Batch Integration provides a collection of components to use Spring Batch and Spring Integration together. Use cases that Spring Batch Integration provide for include:

• Asynchronous item processing
• Remote chunking
• Launching batch jobs via messages
• Remote partitioning

These capabilities take batch processing beyond what JSR-352 provides and allows users to develop batch applications that scale beyond a single JVM. You can read more about Spring Batch Integration and it's components in the reference documentation here: http://docs.spring.io/spring-batch/trunk/reference/html/springBatchIntegration.html.

Complete overhaul of dependencies

We took this opportunity to review all third party dependencies for Spring Batch and bring them up to date. As part of this exercise, we also brought them in alignment with the other projects in the Spring portfolio to allow for the easiest experience in adding Spring Batch to an existing application (or adding other projects to a Spring Batch project).

Support for SQLite

While HSQLDB is useful for many testing scenarios, a file based system like SQLite can also be very useful. With the 3.0 release we have added the job repository DDL for SQLite to address these use cases.

Job scope

Spring Batch's step scope allows developers to delay the creation of objects until a particular step is executed. This functionality has also exposed the ability to provide late binding of properties in batch artifacts. With this 3.0 release, Spring Batch introduces a Job scope. This scope works in the same way as the step scope (delays the creation of objects via proxies), however it delays the creation until the job executes instead of the step. This can be helpful when defining multiple jobs in a context or when heavy weight initialization processes occur in step level components. You can read more about the job scope in the reference manual here: http://docs.spring.io/spring-batch/trunk/reference/html/configureStep.html#job-scope.

Move from Maven to Gradle

Finally, this release is the first for Spring Batch to move from Maven to Gradle for an internal build system. This change will have zero effect on developers consuming the jars. They will still be available via Maven Central for maven users.

Conclusion

3.0.0.RC1 represents the completion of the next major milestone for Spring Batch. It brings the standards that JSR-352 provides to our community as well as providing an exhaustive collection of additional features for the advanced user. We look forward to your feedback in the forums, social media, and in person at SpringOne2GX!

Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013 in Santa Clara, CA.

Speaker: Rob Winch Spring Security is a framework that focuses on providing both authentication and authorization to Java applications. Like all Spring projects, the real power of Spring Security is found in how easily it can be extended to meet custom requirements. In this presentation Rob will incrementally apply the new features found in Spring Security 3.2 to an existing application to demonstrate how it can meet your authentication and authorization needs.

Learn more about Spring Security 3.2 at http://projects.spring.io/spring-security/

Learn more about using Spring at: http://www.spring.io

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Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013 in Santa Clara, CA.

Join Chris Beams as he dives into http://spring.io - the new spring website. It's chock full of amazing new resources that you can share with your co-workers who might be new to Spring, or simply helping to introduce Spring to those who might not be familiar with it - people coding in other languages, frameworks, or platforms. You've asked us to help make it easier to win the comparisons, and we've listened. Attend this session to get the ammo you need to win that internal bake off, and learn the details about how the site was built and deployed. now and open source project!

Learn more about the open source spring.io website at our blog:

http://spring.io/blog/2014/03/27/project-sagan-open-sourcing-spring-io

http://spring.io/blog/2014/04/04/project-sagan-zero-downtime-deployments

http://spring.io/blog/2014/04/28/project-sagan-client-side-architecture

http://spring.io/blog/2014/04/18/project-sagan-upgrading-to-jdk-8

Learn more about Spring Framework 4.0 http://projects.spring.io/spring-framework

Learn more about Spring Boot http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot

Learn more about using CloudFoundry at: http://cloudfoundry.org/

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The Spring Integration development team is pleased to announce the release of the First Milestone of the Java DSL extension for Spring Integration!

The general purpose of the Java DSL is to provide a fluent and convenient API for Message Flows based on EIP and avoid boilerplate Spring Integration configuration.

The org.springframework.integration:spring-integration-java-dsl:1.0.0.M1 artifact is available from the Spring IO Milestone Repository.

You can find in more information in the Reference Manual and from source code, however let us shed some light on the main features.

The Concept

The Spring Integration Java DSL is not similar to existing Scala and Groovy DSls; nor is it similar to the Apache Camel Java DSL, although it does implement the method-chain…

Speakers: Ashley Puls, New Relic Josh Long, Pivotal

There is more and more usage of JavaScript on the client side today. Many are starting down the difficult path of full blown application development in JS on the client side, going beyond having a simple rollover menu logic or presentation component. But tracking and tracing effectively means looking at the whole application, not just the front end. New Relic can be used either in development or production to diagnose hybrid JavaScript/Java applications. In this session, Josh Long (Pivotal) and Ashley Puls (New Relic) will show how you can track and trace your way through today's hybrid JavaScript+Java web apps - resolving slow page loads, blocked threads, slow queries, etc.

Learn more about using New Relic at: http://www.newrelic.com

Learn more about using Spring at: http://www.spring.io

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The Groovy development team is pleased to announce the release of Groovy 2.3.0!

Groovy 2.3 is the new major release of the Groovy programming language for the JVM, featuring:

• official support for running Groovy on JDK 8
• a new trait keyword to define new units of code for composing behaviors
• new and improved compile-time code transformations like:
  • @TailRecursive: for transforming methods with tail recursion to avoid blowing the stack,
  • @Builder: to easily implement fluent builders, generated by the Groovy compiler itself
  • @Sortable: to transform a class to implement Comparable using the various properties of the class
• a new NIO2 module with Path support
• lightening fast JSON parsing and building as covered in the recent article on InfoQ
• closure parameter type inference…

[callout title=Updated March 31 2015]This blog is outdated and no longer maintained. Please refer to the Test Section of the reference documentation for updated documentation. [/callout]

On Monday I announced the release of Spring Security 4.0.0.M1. This is the first of a three part blog series introducing the Spring Security Testing support. The series outline can be seen below:

• In this post we will discuss how spring-security-test makes method based security testing easier
• Our second post will demonstrate how to use spring-security-test with Spring MVC Test
• Our final post will demonstrate how to use spring-security-test with Spring Test MVC HtmlUnit
…

The Reactor team is pleased to announce that some significant updates to the Reactor framework are now available in the 1.1.0.RELEASE version of Reactor's flexible, asynchronous, fast data framework. This version includes numerous bug fixes and rewrites of key components to make them faster and, maybe more importantly, more efficient in terms of memory usage. Reactor 1.1 now includes the fantastic gs-collections library from Goldman Sachs [1] which provides a very fluent API for dealing with maps and collections of all kinds.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of changes between Reactor 1.0 and 1.…