Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring! As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it. Don't forget that SpringOne 2GX 2013 early bird expires August 9th, so hurry to secure the discounted rate!

1. Spring framework committer Rossen Stoyanchev has a great post on Spring Framework 4.0 M2's support for WebSocket Messaging Architectures.
2. Spring Shell lead Dr. Mark Pollack has announced that Spring Shell 1.0.1.M1 has just been released.
3. Spring Batch 2.2.1.RELEASE is now available. This release is mostly bug fixes and documentation improvements.
4. I don't know if you've been following along, but we're starting to really flesh out the SpringOne2GX 2013 schedule! I'm looking forward to both seeing, and presenting, at many different talks this year. One talk I'd like to see is Thymeleaf: improving your Spring view layer with natural templates. I expect this year will be a very exciting year for a number of reasons, and I hope you'll share the experience with us.
5. We've added some more SpringOne talks recently:
   
   • Spring and Web Content Management
   • Spring Data Community Lightning Talks
   • Application Security Pitfalls
   • Hadoop - Just the Basics for Big Data Rookies
   • Spring Integration Internals
6. Our pal Tobias Flohre has put together a nice post comparing how the JSR 352 API compares to the Spring Batch. Spring Batch 3.0 will be fully JSR 352 API compliant this fall by SpringOne, but was the inspiration for the JSR in the first place -- Spring Batch 1.0 was released in 2008 and has been gathering steam ever since.
7. Want to learn more about Spring Scala? Watch Spring Scala lead talk about it at ScalaDays New York.
8. As I mentioned last week, you'd do well to also follow This Week in Cloud Foundry, which has a lot of great content following last week's large announcement of a partnership between Pivotal and IBM.
   
9. The Reactor project lead by John Brisbin has just announced support for a @EnableReactor annotation for Spring Java configuration.
10. ..Speaking of Thymeleaf (the open source, Spring MVC, HTML5 and Tiles-friendly view and templating engine), version 2.1 will have parameterizable fragments. Do you want to test them? Try the 2.1.0-SNAPSHOT version when specifying your Maven repository-compatible coordinates.
11. Our friend Johnathan Mark Smith is at it again, this time with a video on using Spring Data MongoDB. Definitely worth a look.
12. Check out a webinar next month taming coupling & cohesive problems with modularity and Spring with Param Rengaiah.

Dear Spring Community,

I am pleased to announce the first milestone release Spring Shell 1.1. Spring Shell is an interactive shell that can be easily extended with commands using a Spring based programming model. This release adds support for testing of commands as well as several bug fixes and general improvements. Many thanks to to those who submitted pull-requests

Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog

We look forward to your feedback on the forum or in the issue tracker.

We are pleased to announce that Spring Batch 2.2.1.RELEASE is now available via Maven Central, Github and the SpringSource download repository. This release addresses a number of bugs 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 in the forum and issue tracker.

Hey everyone! Remember that SpringOne 2GX 2013 early bird expires August 9th, so hurry to secure the discounted rate! Also, make sure to check the agenda as new sessions have been added. This week I'm at OSCON talking to developers in the wonderful city of Portland, OR about Spring 4, REST and joining my colleagues at Pivotal to talk about Cloud Foundry, big data, and much more! If you'd like to chat, I hope you'll come to the talks that we're putting on and visit us at the Pivotal booth in the exhibition hall! It's been a big week for both Spring and Pivotal:

1. Pivotal HD 1.0, the world's fastest Hadoop distribution, was released in two flavors - Community Edition, and a Pivotal Single Node Edition (VM), a Virtual Machine download. Head over to gopivotal.com and give it a test drive - Community Edition deploys up to a 50 node cluster!
2. We're celebrating Project Reactor's initial milestone release - 1.0.0M1 - which already benchmarked TCP on Netty at 300% faster than Netty alone! When integrated into key Spring technologies, the possibilities of Fast Data are going to blow people's hair back. Congrats to Jon Brisbin!
3. Spring Data Arora Service Release 2 is available for download.
4. Martin Lippert published an excellent blog on Annotations and Java Config support that are available in Spring Tool Suite 3.3.0. Support of JavaConfig as an XML alternative across the Spring ecosystem is nearing a pervasive level.
5. Join Hemant Joshi as he introduces how to use Spring and the Cucumber BDD testing framework in a webinar on July 30th, 2013.
6. Hadoop hungry? Join us for a Webinar series -- “What You Can Do with Hadoop” on the first Thursday of every month. The first webinar on August 1st, 2013 will provide in-depth details about the features and tutorials included in the Pivotal HD Single Node (VM).
   • Register today for the 9 AM PT session
   • Register today for the 7 PM session
7. My buddy Andy Piper (@andypiper) puts together a wonderful roundup of Cloud Foundry called This Week in Cloud Foundry. I can't recommend it enough! He just started, and he's doing a heckuva job!
8. The Zenika blog has a very nice post on how to document a REST API with Swagger, which you can transparently layer on top of your Spring MVC API.
9. Matt Stine also has a great post on Spring, Continuous Integration and CloudFoundry.
10. The JavaCode Geeks blog has a nice post on how to add validation to a REST API
11. The Pivotal blog has a really great post on how Tomcat compares to Pivotal's tcServer, a binary-compatible distribution of Tomcat that we support and augment for deployment
12. Also on the Pivotal blog, a fantastic post on how Spring Data GemFire (and GemFire) can really boost your application's performance!
13. Xavier Padró's has a really nice introduction to messaging with Spring
14. This week at OSCON, I found affixed to all the bulletin boards and on the entry-doors into the conference a notice advertising a hackathon being run by inBloom, which is a nonprofit data and content services company working to support school districts as they implement great personalized learning tools for kids, teachers, and parents. inBloom is sponsoring a 2-day hackathon at OSCON to work on their open source content services. Check out the projects and the code! I really enjoyed meeting these fine people and encourage any Spring ninjas out there to raise your hands and contribute!
    

As I wrote previously, a WebSocket API is only the starting point for WebSocket-style messaging applications. Many practical challenges remain. As one Tomcat mailing list user mused recently:

it does seem to me that websockets is still not really "production-ready", (I am not talking about the Tomcat implementation per se, but more generally) ... native websockets capability in IE is only available since IE-10 and that solutions which allow this to work in lower IE versions are a bit "iffy" (relying on a diversion through Adobe's FlashPlayer e.g.). (Most of our customers are largish corporations, which are not going to update their browsers, nor open special ports in their firewalls, just to please us).

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I am pleased to announce the availability of the second service release of the Spring Data Arora release train. It includes quite a few significant bug fixes that we have already released in the first milestone for the Babbage release train. To makethem available in an official release, we backported them into this one here. The modules included are:

• Spring Data Commons 1.5.2 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data JPA 1.3.4 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data MongoDB 1.2.3 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Neo4j 2.2.2 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog

The artifacts are also available in Maven central. You find a comprehensive list of the 46 tickets resolved in our JIRA. The next release is going to be a release candidate for the Babbage release train in early August. You can find details for this release in the Spring Data Commons wiki.

If you want to learn more about the Spring Data family of projects, the best event to do is SpringOne 2013 being held in Santa Clara early September. Hope to see you there!

Spring applications that use JavaConfig instead of XML become more and more popular. Today we would like to show you the new features in the latest Spring Tool Suite 3.3.0 release that makes it easier for you to program Spring applications using annotations and JavaConfig instead of XML.

Project configuration

Let's assume you implement a web application based on Spring and JavaConfig. A common practice would be to have a base @Configuration class where you define the common base Spring configuration in your application. That might look like this:

@Configuration
@ComponentScan 
class…

I'm super excited to announce the first milestone release of Project Reactor! Project Reactor is a foundational framework for building asynchronous, FastData applications on the JVM. Some of the goodness in Reactor 1.0.0.M1 includes: reactive composition helpers Stream and Promise, a TcpServer and TcpClient, and Groovy and Spring support. Inspired by Reactive Extenstions, RxJava, the new JDK 8 Stream API (and Scala, and others...), these Composables make coordinating asynchronous tasks dead simple. They support traditional callback-style programming using Consumers, but they also offer a…