Happy New Year! Welcome back to this year's final installment of This Week in Spring!

We'll do some of the news, as usual, and then I'll take a look back over the last year in news surrounding Spring, of which there's been much indeed!

1. Matt Raible, who we know has also been looking at Spring Boot, just wrote up our just-released Spring 4 for InfoQ. Definitely worth a read if you have the time!

• Xavier Padró has a nice post on retrying web service operations with RequestHandlerRetryAdvice.
• There's a great discussion on Stack Overflow on Spring's CrudRepository vs. the more JPA-specific JpaRepository with an awesome answer by Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke
• Ken Blair has put together a nice introduction to doing bean mapping using the Orika bean-mapping framework alongside Spring
• Groovy ninja Guillaume LaForge has started putting together a nice roundup of all the latest happenings in the Groovy community, and I'd just like to invite readers of …

In celebration of Spring Framework 4.0 launch, Pivotal is excited to sponsor Manning's "Countdown to 2014" and their "Day of Spring / Groovy / Grails", a joint promotion with Manning Publications where we offer 50% discounts for specific days, on books that are hand-picked by the Spring, Groovy, Grails folks at Pivotal. Manning is also making an additional offer to anyone that purchases the Deal of the Day - they are automatically entered to win one free copy of an eBook and one chance to win an iPad mini!

Monday, December 23 - MEGA DEAL - 50% off everything. Code: gpivdotd13

All codes are good for 48 hours.

You read excerpts from books online for free by clicking on the links below. We hope you enjoy the deals!

Happy holidays! Hopefully with the holiday season comes some time off, and a chance to relax and more fully catch up on fun stuff you missed during a busy year. Readers of this column will know there are many channels for developers learning about Spring, and studying the field of technologies that Spring supports. Don't forget about our SpringSource YouTube page, Twitter account, our 15-30 minute "Getting Started" guides, the blog, and of course our Facebook and Google+ pages. I personally want to go back and watch as many SpringOne2GX talks on the YouTube channel as I can.

1. Remeber JHipster? Julien Dubois's Yeoman-powered code generator for Spring applications? Well, 0.0.6 has been released and it has no required Spring XML (and Java EE's web.xml's the last one!) and provides code-generation support for services.
…

We made a few announcements recently about the Spring getting started guides, including that the catalog of guides have been migrated to Asciidoctor. We also added several new client-side guides illustrating how to connect to Spring services from a variety of client technologies.

In this post I want to highlight an interesting capability of Spring Boot; within many of the client-side guides we utilized Spring Boot to stand up a Tomcat instance and serve static content. In these guides we are demonstrating JavaScript client code, not Java or Groovy! If you are already familiar with Boot, then…

Following the recent 3.0.0.RELEASE, we are pleased to announce that the second (first public) milestone of Spring Integration 4.0 is now available.

As mentioned in the 3.0 Release Candidate Announcement the recent Spring Integration 3.0 release is fully compatible with Spring Framework 4.0, but it does not use the spring-messaging module. This allows Spring Integration 3.0 to be used with earlier versions of Spring Framework.

The 4.0 stream from which this milestone is built replaces all the core Spring Integration messaging abstractions with those in the spring-messaging module. The reason for another major release so soon after 3.0 is based on the fact that existing applications that directly use the affected SI classes in their code will need to convert to the Spring Framework abstractions. For the most part, this just means package changes in import statements, but full details are provided in the Migration Guide…

Dear Spring Community,

At SpringOne, we launched a brand new Spring web site, including a collection of Getting Started Guides. These quick-hit guides are proving very popular as they get right to the point on how to use Spring to address several common tasks such as caching, messaging, and integration.

We are very pleased to announce the addition of several new Getting Started Guides that present Spring as providing services that back rich and mobile clients developed in Backbone, AngularJS, iOS, and other client-side frameworks and platforms. These guides include:

• Consuming a RESTful Web Service with AngularJS
• Consuming a RESTful Web Service with jQuery
• Consuming a RESTful Web Service with rest.js
• Consuming a RESTful Web Service with Sencha Touch
• Consuming a RESTful Web Service with Backbone.js
• Consuming a RESTful Web Service from iOS
• Consuming a RESTful Web Service with Spring for Android
• Building a RESTful Web Service with CORS
• Messaging with STOMP over WebSocket
• Using WebSocket and msgs.js to build an interactive web application
…

Speaker: Jon Brisbin

Slides: www.slideshare.net/jbrisbin

Reactor is a succinct and powerful foundational library for building reactive, fastdata applications on the JVM. Although it is part of the Spring IO platform, the core Reactor libraries have no dependency on Spring. Above the core library, there's direct support for the Disruptor via the high-speed Processor abstraction which provides a Reactor API over the RingBuffer, first-class support for the high-performance JavaChronicle persistent message-passing library through the flexible PersistentQueue abstraction, first-class support for Groovy closures and @CompileStatic, high-performance TCP client and server support based on Netty 4.0, powerful annotation-based Spring support, and much more. Join Jon Brisbin at the event to get introduced to the first major GA release of Reactor, and learn how Reactor's Promise and Stream APIs are used to wrangle the inherent complexity of asynchronous, event-driven application code.

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Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week, well, I'm taking some vacation :) That, of course, means that this week's roundup was even more fun for me - I got to play with the just-released Spring 4! And, to sweeten my vacation, the steady stream of new releases based on Spring 4.0 from the other Spring projects has already started!

If you're using Spring (Spring 4, Spring Boot, and anything else) and have some great new blog, video or sample project you think people should see, don't hesitate to share it with me on Twitter! Matt Raible has already made a helpful blog post: A Webapp Makeover with Spring 4 and Spring Boot where he upgrades his existing Spring 3.2.5, Spring Security 3.1.4 and Jersey 1.18 app to run Spring Framework 4 and Spring Boot.

1. First, the BIG news! Spring CTO Adrian Colyer just announced that Spring 4 has gone GA! If you, like me, have been eagerly awaiting this all year, then don't wait a second longer! Grab those bits as soon as you can. Spring 4, of course, is the first major-version increment since Spring 3.0 back in 2009, and represents a major leap forward for application developers. Join Juergen Hoeller (and many other engineers) on January 9, 2014 for the launch webinar: Introduction to Spring Framework 4.0.
2. Concurrent with the Spring 4 release, we've just added several new guides to the insanely popular Getting Started guides collection. Among the new guides, you'll find help on CORS, jQuery-, Sencha-, Angular.js-integration, and much more!
3. Rob Winch followed very shortly after, announcing that Spring Security 3.2.0 RELEASE is available! Now, I'm going to finally update the code to my talk on using Spring's REST stack, along with Spring Security and Spring Security OAuth, to the new revision! Join Rob on January 16th, 2014 for a talk focused on the new release of Spring Security 3.2.
4. Once Spring 4 was released, Spring Integration lead Gary Russell wasted no time in getting the long-awaited Spring Integration 3.0 out the door! This new release features many new improvements, which were mostly covered in the release candidate announcement.
5. Projects lead Martin Lippert has just announced that Spring Tool Suite and Groovy/Grails Tool Suite 3.5.0.M1 are now available. This update revs to Groovy 2.2, Grails 2.3.4, and tc Server 2.9.4, and advanced content-assist for Spring Boot projects, improved dashboard feeds, and support for the new client-side getting started guides. This cut builds on Eclipse Kepler SR1. Check it out!
6. Spring Data project lead Oliver Gierke has just announced the latest Spring Data release train, Spring Data Babbage SR2, has just been released. The service release bundles a bunch of important enhancements and bug fixes and is a recommended upgrade. You can find all issues fixed in this release in our JIRA
7. Spring ninja Greg Turnquist put together a very nice look at the aforementioned Getting Started guides' migration to Asciidotor, behind the scenes.
8. Spring ninja and Boot co-lead Phil Webb and I did a talk, Improving Your Java Configuration Muscle Memory, for SpringOne2GX 2013, which is now available as a replay on our YouTube channel. Check it out!
9. Patrick Grimard's written a post introducing how to setup a Spring MVC interceptor to handle CORS requests. For more details on the subject of CORS, check out our Understanding CORS page, and then check out our new Getting Started guide which shows a Servlet Filter-centric alternative approach to basically do the same thing. This builds on Spring Boot, and uses a Filter instead of an interceptor, but the effect is the same.
10. Our pal Bozhidar Bozhanov has written a great post all about web sockets, which of course work great with Spring 4!, complete with slides and codes! Be sure to check it out! This post uses a more low level approach to websockets, which Spring also supports, where all messages get funneled through one handler. Me personally, I like using the higher level STOMP support to avoid having to funnel all requests through the same handler, and then picking each request apart with a switch statement. Either way, this is a great post and - because it's lower level - gives you a better understanding of what's happening underneath the hood. Check it out!
11. With a new release comes updated Maven artifacts. Last week, I mentioned that Spring 4 now features a very handy bill of materials Maven pom.xml. You should use that to simplify things. Additionally, if you're a BinTray user, be aware that the new release is already available there, as well.

We are pleased to announce that Spring Integration 3.0 is now available.

The features in the release were covered in the recent announcement for the release candidate; a few minor changes made since then can be seen in the release notes.

Reference | API

Please visit the project page for more information and how to get this important release.