Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the first milestone release 3.5.0.M1 of the Spring Tool Suite (STS) and the Groovy/Grails Tool Suite (GGTS).

Highlights from this milestone build include:

• improved new dashboard (news feeds are back)
• new advanced content-assist for Spring Boot projects
• support for new client side getting started guides
• support for Groovy 2.2
• updated to Grails 2.3.4
• updated to tc Server 2.9.4

Both tool suites ship on top of the latest Eclipse Kepler SR1 release.

To download the distributions, please go visit:

• Spring Tool Suite: https://spring.io/tools/sts/all
• Groovy/Grails Tool Suite: https://spring.io/tools/ggts/all

Detailed new and noteworthy notes can be found here: STS/GGTS 3.5.0.M1 New & Noteworthy.

3.5.0.M2 is scheduled for early Febuary 2014, followed by the 3.5.0 release in early March 2014 - shortly after the Eclipse Kepler SR2 release.

Enjoy!

The Spring Data team has just released the second service release for the Babbage release train. It includes the following modules:

• Spring Data Commons 1.6.3 - Changelog - JavaDoc - Artifacts
• Spring Data JPA 1.4.3 - Changelog - JavaDoc - Artifacts
• Spring Data MongoDB 1.3.3 - Changelog - JavaDoc - Artifacts
• Spring Data Neo4j 2.3.3 - Changelog - JavaDoc - Artifacts

The 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.

The next step will be the second milestone of the Codd release train. More details about that here…

In celebration of the Spring Framework 4.0 launch, Pivotal is excited to continue sponsoring Manning's "Countdown to 2014". We are offering 50% discounts for specific days, on books that are hand-picked by the Pivotal/Spring team. Manning is also making an additional offer to anyone that registers for the 2014 countdown - they are automatically entered to win one of two eBooks given away daily and a shot at the grand prize, an iPad Air.

Thursday, December 12 & Friday December 13th are Spring Days! (see below for book details)

Just go to manning.com and choose any (or all) of these selected books. Enter srgdotd13 in the Promotional Code box when you check out to get the discount.

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

Spring in Action, 4th Edition By Craig Walls   Read except from Chapter 1	Spring Integration in Action By Mark Fisher, Jonas Partner, Marius Bogoevici, and Iwein Fuld Foreword by Rod Johnson Sample chapter 3 Sample chapter 18	Spring Batch in Action By Arnaud Cogoluegnes, Thierry Templier, Gary Gregory, Olivier Bazoud Sample chapter 1 Sample chapter 5
Spring in Practice by Willie Wheeler with Joshua White Sample chapter 11 Sample chapter 13	RabbitMQ in Action By Alvaro Videla and Jason J.W. Williams Sample chapter 1 Sample chapter 8	RabbitMQ in Depth By Gavin M. Roy   Read Except from Chapter 1

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! This week I'm going to be in Los Angeles, talking to developers at Disney about Spring. If you're in the area, I'd love to see you all there, too. We're hosting a user-group meeting on December 11th. Here are some details on the event, which takes place tomorrow! I look forward to seeing you there!

Can you believe we're already staring down the end of the year? @_@

That means it's time for the annual release of Spring Framework, 4.0! We look forward to your feedback on the release.

1. Don't miss the Spring Framework 4.0 launch webinar, "Introduction to Spring Framework 4.0", with none other than Juergen Hoeller, on Jan 9th, 2014, first major Spring Framework release since 2009!
2. Be sure to check out the webinar by busiest guy in code-business and Spring Security lead Rob Winch on Jan 16, 2014 to hear about Spring Security 3.2.
3. Spring Framework committer and co-lead of Spring Boot Phil Webb introduces Spring 4's new support for Java generics in Spring 4.
4. Thomas Darimont introduces what's new in Spring Data MongoDB 1.4 M1, including the phenomenal new projection framework and SpEL integration.
5. If you're a user of the Spring-powered Broadleaf e-commerce engine, then you might want to register for the v3.1 web event.
6. Our pal Tobias Flohre is back with yet another awesome post, Batch processing and the Java Enterprise Edition (JSR-352, JEE7, Spring Batch). The title speaks for itself - its a good quick overview of where the technologies sit.
7. And, Petri Kainulainen is back at it again with an awesome followup to his series on adding social features to a Spring MVC Web Application with Spring Social. This post is on unit testing that integration.
8. The @GoPivotal blog has an interesting case study of RabbitMQ's deployment at Norwegian Broadcast corporation.

9. Speaking of Phil Webb and Rob Winch, one of the amazing things included in last week's announcement of Spring Framework RC2 was their wonderful addition of a "bill of materials" Maven POM: spring-framework-bom. Use it like this:

   <dependencyManagement>
       <dependencies>
           <dependency>
               <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
               <artifactId>spring-framework-bom</artifactId>
               <version>4.0.0.RC2</version>
               <type>pom</type>
               <scope>import</scope>
           </dependency>
       </dependencies>
   </dependencyManagement>
   

   Then, simply import the version of the Spring dependency that you want without specifying the version in your pom.xml.

10. There's another case study on the GoPivotal blog, this on now Hulu scaled serving 4 billion videos using Redis. That's awesome!

11. Sudhir Dharmadhikari put together an interesting post on using Spring Roo's aspect approach the AndroMDA project
12. Bozhidar Bozhanov, who I loved getting to see again last week in Sofia, has moved the Spring Social Google+ code to GitHub.
13. 

Last but not least, It's Pivotal day at Manning!  

All Spring and Groovy books half price on special deal days, to celebrate the Spring Framework 4.0 launch, Pivotal is sponsoring Spring and Groovy day in Manning's Countdown to 2014! On certain deal days like Monday Dec 9,10; Thursday Dec 12, 13; Monday Dec 23, 24; and Thursday Dec 26, 27, you can get any of Manning's Spring and Groovy books for half off-eBook, pBook, or MEAP. Just go to Manning.com and choose any (or all) of these selected books. Enter gpivdotd13 in the Promotional Code box when you check out to get the discount. BONUS: If you register for Manning's Countdown to 2014, you'll have a chance to win one of two eBooks given…

Speakers: Yann Cébron (JetBrains) and Josh Long (Pivotal)

In this webinar, Yann Cébron (JetBrains) is joined by our guest Josh Long (Pivotal). Together, they will highlight the new features for Spring support included in these major releases that will help you to be more productive. We will be performing hands-on demonstrations so you'll be able to pick up some useful productivity tips & tricks for your daily work. Last but not least, we will share some insight into future plans for Spring support in IntelliJ IDEA. IntelliJ IDEA 13 will be released in early December, and Spring 4.0 is just around the corner too. Don't miss this opportunity to see and hear about the latest features and have your questions answered on the spot.

!{iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/L7p3wzujAOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen}{/iframe}

Speakers: Pieter Humphrey (Martin Lippert)

A short demo of building a Spring Boot runnable REST service, with Actuator support, as a Java Application in just a few seconds. Then we show enhancing it with a simple Hello World data structure and showing "Hello World" string return values to your browser, and a quick tour through Spring Boot's Actuator features.

Learn more about Spring Tool Suite at http://www.spring.io/tools

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

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

!{iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/47xNBNd-LLI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen}{/iframe}

Speaker: Pieter Humphrey (Martin Lippert)

A walk through of the new spring.io getting started guide, importing a spring.io guide into STS, building a simple, parameterized, robust REST web service in about 6 minutes using Spring Boot, Spring Tool Suite, and Spring Framework 4.0 Follow along at: https://spring.io/guides/gs/rest-service/

Learn more about Spring Tool Suite at http://www.spring.io/tools

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

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

!{iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/8Jc28CONVUc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen}{/iframe}

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 9 - MEGA DEAL - 50% off pBooks, including Spring Day / Groovy Day books listed below. 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!

Spring in Action, 4th Edition By Craig Walls Read except from Chapter 1	Spring Integration in Action By Mark Fisher, Jonas Partner, Marius Bogoevici, and Iwein Fuld Foreword by Rod Johnson Sample chapter 3 Sample chapter 18	Spring Batch in Action By Arnaud Cogoluegnes, Thierry Templier, Gary Gregory, Olivier Bazoud Sample chapter 1 Sample chapter 5
Spring in Practice by Willie Wheeler with Joshua White Sample chapter 11 Sample chapter 13	RabbitMQ in Action By Alvaro Videla and Jason J.W. Williams Sample chapter 1 Sample chapter 8	RabbitMQ in Depth By Gavin M. Roy Read Except from Chapter 1

Speaker: Juergen Hoeller

The Spring Framework re-invented enterprise Java in the last decade. Together with the rest of the upcoming Spring IO micro platform, a new Spring Framework generation will power the next decade of JVM-based innovation.

Join Juergen Hoeller to learn about Spring Framework 4.0, its refined annotation-based component and configuration model, and how it relates to Java 8, Java EE 7, Groovy, WebSockets, as well as Spring Boot and Spring Integration.

Thursday, January 9, 2014 3:00pm GMT Time (London GMT) Register

Thursday, January 9, 2014 10:00am PST (San Francisco, GMT-08:00) …