In my third post I discussed how to use WebDriver to make designing our tests easier with the Page Object Pattern. In this post, I'm going to discuss how to use Geb to make our testing with MockMvc more Groovy.

Why Geb and MockMvc

Geb is backed by WebDriver, so it offers many of the same benefits we got from WebDriver. However, Geb makes things even easier by taking care of some of the boiler plate code for us. Of course we want to use MockMvc so that we do no need to deploy our code to a server. The easiest way to understand the benefits of using Geb is to jump into an example.

NOTE: Another great feature of Geb is its exceptional documentation…

Spring's caching abstraction is available as from Spring 3.1 and it was about time to show it some more love. In this post, I want to walk you through the major improvement in that area which is the JCache (JSR-107) annotations support.

As you may have heard, JSR-107 went final after all, 13 years after the initial proposal. For those who are familiar with Spring’s caching annotations, the following table describes the mapping between the Spring annotations and the JSR-107 counterpart:

Almost ten years ago Adrian Colyer wrote a memorable blog post, giving the best explanation on aspect oriented programming (AOP) out there: clear and simple style, accurate content, no buzzwords. If you've taken a look at the the earlier two posts in this series, you may have noticed some of our architecture choices in the client module of the Sagan application, including the use of JavaScript modules.

In this post, I want to walk you through the basics of JavaScript modules in the style of Adrian's post: clear, simple, accurate, no buzzwords!

Why JavaScript needs modularity too

If, like me…

We are pleased to announce that Spring Batch 2.2.6.RELEASE is now available via Maven Central, Github and the SpringSource download repository. This is the 6th maintenance release for the 2.2.x branch of Spring Batch and addresses a number of bugs, a few minor enhancements, and documentation updates. Many thanks to all of those who submitted the many pull requests that went into this release.

Spring Batch Home | Source on GitHub | Reference Documentation

We look forward to your feedback.

Speaker: Josh Long

Alright, so maybe "bootiful" won't ever work, but I tried, and it was worth it too because you're reading this. Spring Boot, the new convention-over-configuration centric framework from the Spring team at Pivotal, marries Spring's flexibility with conventional, common sense defaults to make application development not just fly, but pleasant! Join Spring developer advocate Josh Long for a look at what Spring Boot is, why it's turning heads, why you should consider it for your next application (REST, web, batch, big-data, integration, whatever!) and how to get started.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014 3:00 pm (London, UTC+01:00) Register

Tuesday, April 15, 2014 10:00 am Pacific Daylight Time (San Francisco, UTC-07:00) Register

Speakers: Martin Lippert (Pivotal), Mike Milinkovich (Eclipse Foundation)

The Eclipse IDE (as one example) is great, but increasingly we are seeing new projects and companies working in the cloud-based developer tooling space, using a front-end that runs purely in the browser. The Eclipse Orion project is one example of this. While the new approaches look promising, they are usually completely disconnected from the existing desktop-class IDEs and are still lightyears away from working well for Java developers. In this webinar Martin Lippert will provide a sneak peek into Project Flux, a new project that is hosted at Eclipse and that we've been working on that aims at bridging this gap between existing desktop-class IDEs and future cloud-based developer tooling. While this project is still far away from shipping a ready-to-use release, the webinar provides an insight into the prototype and what is coming in the future. Special guest introduction from Mike Milinkovich, exec director of the eclipse foundation.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014 3:00 pm (London, UTC+01:00) Register

Tuesday, April 22, 2014 10:00 am Pacific Daylight Time (San Francisco, UTC-07:00) Register

Speakers: Josh Long (Pivotal) and Ashley Puls (New Relic)

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 Java web apps - resolving slow page loads, blocked threads, slow queries, etc.

Tuesday, April 30, 2014 3:00 pm (London, UTC+01:00) Register

Tuesday, April 30, 2014 10:00 am Pacific Daylight Time (San Francisco, UTC-07:00) Register

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring!

Tomorrow, I'll be presenting on the vJUG, a virtual JUG, about Spring Boot. Don't tell anyone, but the presentation itself is going to be based on a talk that Spring Boot co-founder Phil Webb and I have been planning. The code is already online, so check it out and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow! If you miss the talk, and you happen to be in the bay area, then join us on Thursday evening at the Pivotal offices here in San Francisco for a more caffeinated version of the same talk with both Phil and myself!

Then, this Sunday, I'm off to spread the Spring love! I'll touchdown first in Paris for Devoxx FR. From there, it's off to Bangalore, India, for the Great Indian Developer Summit. I haven't been there since 2012 and am very much looking forward to it and to seeing the amazing Spring community there. Then, on my way home I'll pop in to Belgium for a talk at the Belgium JUG…

Spring Boot 1.0.1.RELEASE is available in Maven Central and the repo.spring.io repository. This is a bug fix release, although a couple of new features have been added:

• MessageSource caching can be specified in application.properties
• ActiveMQ connection credentials can be externalized to application.properties
• There is a new section on Security auto configuration in the reference guide

There was a security bug-fix for the Actuator, so anyone using Spring Security and the Actuator endpoints should upgrade. No backwards compatibility problems or changes to existing functionality are…