One of the most interesting capabilities of Spring Cloud is its extensibility. You can extend it to support additional clouds, enhance already supported clouds, support new services, new service connectors--all without modifying the Spring Cloud code itself. In this blog, we explore this capability. If you haven’t done so already, please read the first and second blog in this series to acquire sufficient background.

The three axes of extensibility

Spring Cloud provides extensibility along three orthogonal directions. You may extend it in one of these directions and orthogonality ensures that…

On behalf of the Spring XD team, I am very pleased to announce the general availability of Spring XD 1.0! You can download the zip distribution. You can also install on OSX using homebrew and on RHEL/CentOs using yum.

Spring XD's goal is to be your one stop shop for developing and deploying Big Data Applications. Such applications require a wide range of technologies to address different use-cases while interoperating as a cohesive process. The steps in this process include:

• Data collection
• Real-time streaming and analytics
• Data cleansing
• Batch processing (both on and off Hadoop)
• Machine learning and exploratory data analysis
• Visualization and Reporting
• Closed loop analytics between real-time and batch processing
…

In the last blog, I showed you how to use Spring Cloud's Java configuration option to obtain service connectors declaratively (there is also XML namespace support, if you need it). In this blog, we will take a closer look at how you would use Spring Cloud programmatically. This will help in the situations where you cannot use Java or XML configuration. It will also demystify how Spring Cloud works and prepare for the next blog in this series, where we discuss extending Spring Cloud.

To work with Spring Cloud we need to access an object of the Cloud class. However, you can’t create a Cloud object directly (its constructor is not public). Instead, you will obtain it through CloudFactory…

Speaker: Josh Long, Pivotal

Microservices? A thing? Or hype? What does it mean in practice? The answer, like so many Facebook statuses, is complicated. In broad strokes, Microservices offer a refreshed approach to application architecture. Microservices are a new way to describe many of the patterns that have fallen out of large-scale applications in practice over the recent years. There is no doubt that the approach works. The question is: how does one build a microservice architecture? Join Josh Long for this webinar introducing Spring's support for building microservice architectures.

REGISTRATION CLOSED ON 9/11 AT CAPACITY

Tuesday, Sept 16th, 2014 3:00PM BST (London UTC+01:00)

Tuesday, Sept 16th, 2014 10:00 am Pacific Daylight Time (San Francisco, UTC-07:00)

Speakers: Josh Long and Joram Barrez, Activiti

Today's applications are complex, distributed systems that - taken together - produce results. Tracking the flow of work through that system, however, becomes increasingly more painful as automated- and human-driven tasks are integrated into business processes. Business can't react to what it can't see. Business can't measure what it can't see. "Workflow" describes the sequence of processes through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion. Workflow systems, like Activiti, describe and then execute these processes. Activiti is an open-source, Apache 2-licensed workflow engine that works with Spring and Spring Boot. In this webinar, join Spring Developer Advocate Josh Long and Activiti-ninja Joram Barrez for a look at how to distill, describe and reuse complex business processes using Spring (and Spring Boot) and Activiti.

Tuesday, Sept 23rd, 2014 3:00PM BST (London UTC+01:00) Register

Tuesday, Sept 23rd, 2014 10:00 am Pacific Daylight Time (San Francisco, UTC-07:00) Register

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week saw the release of the amazing Spring XD 1.0.0.RELEASE. The release announcement is a good place to start your big-data journey. There, you'll find links to other great posts, learning content, etc. This is a great opportunity to evaluate what you hope to get out of your data, and whether you're getting it. Spring XD is your big-data Swiss-army knife: it can support live, streaming workloads; batch-centric offline workloads; and general data integration solutions. If you digest but one post from this week's roundup, let it be …

On behalf of the Spring Data team I am pleased to announce the availability of the second service release of the Dijkstra release train. It includes 49 fixes overall for the following modules:

• Spring Data Commons 1.8.2 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data JPA 1.6.2 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data MongoDB 1.5.2 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Neo4j 3.1.2 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Solr 1.2.2 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Couchbase 1.1.2 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Cassandra 1.0.2 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Elasticsearch 1.0.2 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - …

Recently Juergen Hoeller announced the availability of the first of two 4.1 release candidates. Brian Clozel followed up with a post on the static web resources handling enhancements. Previously Stephane Nicoll blogged about cache and JMS related improvements. The goal of this post is to summarize Spring MVC improvements.

The JDK 1.8 java.util.Optional is now supported for @RequestParam, @RequestHeader and @MatrixVariable controller method arguments while ListenableFuture is supported as a return value alternative to DeferredResult where an underlying service (or perhaps a call to AsyncRestTemplate) already returns…

We are pleased to announce that Spring Batch Admin 1.3.0.RELEASE is now available via Maven Central, Github and the SpringSource download repository. This release provides updates to Spring Batch Admin to make it compatible with Spring Batch 2.2.x and beyond. In addition to the minor functional updates, this release also provides an overall update to third party dependencies. As noted previously, this will be the last major version with the spring-batch-integration module included as it has been moved to Spring Batch as of Spring Batch 3.0. As always, we look forward to your feedback in…