Welcome back to another installation of This Week in Spring! What a week! We're fast approaching the final stretch of the journey to SpringOne2GX 2013 and preparations are underway at full tilt. This year's going to be memorable. I wish I could tell you more, but trust me when I say you need to be at this show this year! :)

Anyway, let's get on with the roundup!

1. Mark Pollack has announced the release of Spring XD 1.0 milestone 1. Spring XD is a unified, distributed, and extensible system for data ingestion, real time analytics, batch processing, and data export. The project’s goal is to simplify the development of big data applications.
2. Join Tony Erksine from Liberty University on June 27th as he instructs us How to talk Spring and Influence People, a pragmatic lesson on soft skills and technology adoption strategies needed to help get other people in your company excited about and using, new technology -- in this case, with Spring.
3. Want a pass to SpringOne 2GX 2013? If you're a Spring champion, show off your stuff on our champions forum and follow these instructions by June 21, 2013. You might be one of our 5 lucky winners! (If you're a Groovy & Grails or Cloud Foundry champion, never fear, we will be rolling out future contests for you!)
4. Head over to gopivotal.com for the next blog in the Hadoop 101 series -- How to Use Spring Batch with Spring for Apache Hadoop.
5. We're excited to launch A Week of Spring in conjunction with Manning Publications. Check out this post for more information on great discounts for titles covering SpringSource technologies! Every day we're posting a new 50% discount code for two books.
6. Our pal Tobias Fiohre is back at it again, this time with not one, not two, but three posts on Java configuration support for Spring Batch, just released in the latest Spring Batch 2.2.0.RELEASE of Spring Batch. The first post looks at how Spring Batch's Java configuration support compares with the XML equivalents. The second post looks at the Spring Batch StepScope, which lets you configure jobs with parameters provided at runtime (as opposed to design-time. The third post looks at how to use the new configuration style with Spring's environment profiles feature.
   
7. Johnathan Mark Smith has put together a post on how use Spring MVC and Spring MVC Test
   
8. Xavier Padró's has put together a nice post that introduces Spring's core Aspect-Oriented Programming support.
   
9. The video replay of the webinar from the Broadleaf Commerce project on their migration from GWT to Spring MVC is now online at our SpringSourceDev YouTube channel.
10. This isn't strictly Spring-related, but I felt it worth mentioning: Java 9 is slated to drop support for compiling Java 1.4-or-older source code. Java 8 is approaching (finally!), and Spring 4 will offer first class support for Java 8 lambas. Java 6 is EOL as of February 2013, so if you're not already on Java 7, consider just making the jump to Java 8 when it drops early next year. If you're migrating right now, definitely consider looking at Java 7 at a minimum. Spring, of course, works well with older JDK versions, but we often provide functionality specific to newer language releases if they're available. For example, we debuted annotations (like @Transactional) when Java 5 made it feasible, as an addition to our then primary support for commons annotations, even while we supported Java 1.3 and 1.4. Java 8 is no different.
11. I did a webinar last week on building REST APIs with Spring. The webinar video will be up soon on our SpringSource Developer YouTube channel. For the many who've asked, the code is available on my GitHub account, and the slides are available on my SlideShare account. Check them out!
    
12. Petri Kainulainen has put together a really detailed, easily-read post on how to plugin a property from a property file when configuring the @Scheduled annotation's CRON expression
    

Dear Spring Community,

I'm happy to announce the release of Spring Social Facebook 1.0.3.RELEASE.

Spring Social is an extension of the Spring Framework that enables you to connect your Java applications to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as Facebook and Twitter.

Spring Social Facebook 1.0.3.RELEASE is made available to address breaking changes forthcoming in Facebook's Graph API to be applied on July 10, 2013. Specifically, the following breaking changes have been addressed:

• The removal of the 'count' property in a list of comments.
• Deprecation of checkins via the /checkins resource. All checkins should be done as posts with a location now.
• Removal of the 'version' property for groups.
• The Graph API no longer returns images for photos with sizes larger than the original image size.

In addition, a handful of small improvements were made to Spring Social Facebook's API binding. See the changelog for details.

To get the software, download the release distribution or change the Spring Social Facebook dependency in your build file to reference 1.0.3.RELEASE.

Important: This release includes changes to enable Spring Social Facebook to work after the July 2013 Breaking Changes. In order for this version of Spring Social Facebook to work prior to July 10, 2013, you'll need to configure your application at Facebook to enable the July 2013 Breaking Changes. Within Facebook's application configuration, go to "Settings->Advanced" and click the "Enabled" radio button next to "July 2013 Breaking Changes".

We invite you to discuss this release as well as the continuing work toward Spring Social 1.1.0 in the Spring Social Forum and to report any bugs or improvements in the Spring Social Facebook issue tracker.

Dear Spring Community,

The Spring XD team is pleased to announce that the first milestone of Spring XD is now available for download.

Spring XD makes it easy to solve common big data problems such as data ingestion and export, real-time analytics, and batch workflow orchestration. The first milestone implements many features and provides a sizable amount of documentation.

For more information, please see the Project Home Page, the Release Notes and the the blog posting.

We would love to hear your feedback as we continue working hard towards the final Spring XD 1.0.0 release. If you have any questions, please use Stackoverflow (Tag: springxd), and to report any bugs or improvements, please use either the Jira Issue Tracker or file a GitHub issue.

Today we are pleased to announce the 1.0 M1 release of Spring XD  (download).Spring XD is a unified, distributed, and extensible system for data ingestion, real time analytics, batch processing, and data export.  The project’s goal is to simplify the development of big data applications.

From the 10,000 foot view, big data applications share many characteristics with Enterprise Integration and Batch applications.  Spring has provided proven solutions for building integration and batch applications for more than 6 years now via the Spring Integration and Spring Batch projects.  Spring XD builds upon this foundation and provides a lightweight runtime environment that is easily configured and assembled via a simple DSL.

In this blog we will introduce the key components of Spring XD, namely Streams, Jobs, Taps, Analytics and the DSL used to declare them, as well as the runtime architecture.  Many more details can be found in the XD Guide.

Streams

A Stream defines how data is collected, processed and stored or forwarded.  For example, a stream may collect syslog data, filter it, and store it in HDFS.  Spring XD provides a DSL to define a stream.  The DSL allows you to start simple using a UNIX pipes-and-filters syntax to build a linear processing flow but lets you also describe more complex flows using an extended syntax.

Sources and Sinks

A simple linear stream consists of the sequence: Input Source, (optional) Processing Steps, and an Output Sink.  As a simple example consider the collection of data from a HTTP Source writing to a File Sink. The DSL to describe this stream is

http | file

You tell Spring XD to create a stream by making a HTTP request to the XD Admin Server which runs on port 8080 by default.  In the M2 release we will provide an interactive shell to communicate with XD, but for M1 the easiest way is to interact with XD is using ‘curl’.

curl -d "http | file" http://localhost:8080/streams/httptest

The name of the stream is httptest, the default HTTP port to listen on is 9000, and the default file location is /tmp/xd/output/${streamname}.

If you post some data on port 9000 with curl

curl -d "hello world" http://localhost:9000

You will see the string hello world inside the file /tmp/xd/output/httptest

To change the default values, you can pass in option arguments

http --port=9090 | file --dir=/var/streams --name=data.txt

The supported sources in M1 are file, time, HTTP, Tail, Twitter Search, Gemfire (Continuous Queries), Gemfire (Cache Event), Syslog and TCP.  The supported sinks are Log, File, HDFS…

We are pleased to announce the availability of Spring Integration 2.2.4 and 2.1.6 maintenance releases.

Spring Integration's Twitter module uses Spring Social Twitter, which has been updated to version 1.0.5 in anticipation of the Twitter v1.0 API retirement. The Spring Social Twitter 1.0.4.RELEASE [1] and 1.0.5.RELEASE [2] announcements provide more information about the recent updates to that project. For anyone using Twitter search adapters, the underlying search API in v1.1 requires authorization, so you will need to update the configuration for any TwitterTemplate (if not already…

Hey guys, welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in New York City, New York, talking to developers at the NYC Java Meetup and at ScalaDays about Spring. We've got a lot of webinars this month, so be sure to check out the details below!

1. Want a pass to SpringOne 2GX 2013? If you're a Spring champion, show off your stuff on our champions forum and follow these instructions by June 21, 2013. You might be one of our 5 lucky winners! (If you're a Groovy & Grails or Cloud Foundry champion, never fear, we will be rolling out future contests for you!)
2. Oliver Gierke has announced Spring Data Babbage, the first milestone of the next Spring Data release train. This release includes a lot of new features, so be sure to check out the release note!
3. Spring Batch 2.2.0 is now available! This is a major release that supports Spring Data, Java Configuration, AMQP, and SQLFire in addition to a number of other features. Spring Batch and our participation in the expert group has heavily informed the JSR-352 specification that recently has been finalized.
4. Spring Tool Suite and Groovy / Grails Toool Suite 3.3.0 M2 has been released, based on Eclipse Kepler 4.3. This milestone release improves Java Configuration support and is Spring Framework 4 ready.
5. Craig Walls has announced that Spring Social Twitter 1.0.5 and Spring Social 1.0.3 have been released! The new release fixes a few bugs and is being made available in anticipation of the deprecation of the 1.0 version of the Twitter API.
6. Gary Russell has also announced the Spring Integration 2.2.4 and 2.1.6 maintenance releases, to incorporate the Spring Social Twitter updates mentioned above.
7. I'll be doing a webinar on Thursday on RESTful service design with Spring. As usual, there will be two sessions - one at 3PM GMT and one at 10:00AM PST - to accommodate as many timezones as possible. The webinar will introduce Spring's stack for building RESTful services. We'll start with a simple API, then advance the API, introducing Hypermedia controls with Spring HATEOAS, introducing conventions-oriented repository-based APIs with Spring Data REST, security with Spring Security OAuth and Spring Social and addressing common cases like file uploads, exception handling, record paging, and Ajax. I look forward to seeing you there!
8. Don't miss Jon Brisbin on June 18th, 2013 as he introduces Introducing Reactor - A framework for asynchronous applications on the JVM. Reactor provides a foundational framework for applications that need high throughput when performing reasonably small chunks of stateless, asynchronous processing.
9. Join Tony Erksine from Liberty University on June 27th as he instructs us How to talk Spring and Influence People, a pragmatic lesson on soft skills and technology adoption strategies needed to help get other developers in your company excited about,a nd using, new technology -- in this case, with Spring.
10. I gave a talk on the latest at the amazing DevNexus conference in March on Spring 3.1, 3.2, and 4.0 in March, and that talk is now available online on InfoQ. Do check out the talk, but also be sure to check out the more up-to-date version of that deck from my talk at JAXConf available on my SlideShare account.
11. Head over to the Pivotal Blog for a short primer on Hadoop programming, which walks you through a simple word count program. The example looks at the canonical word-count problem and then looks at other solutions in the ecosystem like Pig, Hive and Cascading. The next blog in the series will introduce Spring for Apache Hadoop for a beginning audience, providing a unified, consistent alternative to the four different methods discussed in this blog post.
12. In related news, if you're in the New York City area, join me Wednesday evening where I'm giving the same talk at the 10gen offices for the NYCJava meetup. Thanks again go to 10gen, the company behind MongoDB, for hosting the meetup.
13. The JavaBeat blog has a nice post on how to use Spring's robust multipart file upload support. Spring's support abstracts away common APIs for file uploads - including the commons-fileupload API and the Servlet 3 API - and lets you use those APIs for HTTP miltipart-encoded file uploads, typically in web applications or REST services. Definitely worth a read, check it out!
14. Idan Fridman put together a rundown on some of the common types of components in Spring Integration, including splitters, transformers, aggregators, and more.
15. For those of you who are looking to take your Spring skills to a new level of expertise, SpringSource has just released the Professional Spring Training Schedule for July 2013
16. The Spring tutorials blog has a great post introduce Spring's @Async and @Scheduled annotations.

I am pleased to announce the first service milestone release for the Spring Data release train named Babbage. It includes the following modules:

• Spring Data Commons 1.6 M1 - Changelog
• Spring Data JPA 1.4 M1 - Changelog
• Spring Data MongoDB 1.3 M1 - Changelog
• Spring Data Neo4j 2.3 M1 - Changelog

The first milestone includes quite a few new features as well as all the bug fixes already released in the service release for Arora.

A quick tour through the release

Most of the changes of this release have made it into Spring Data Commons to build a solid foundation for the next generation of Spring Data projects and make sure that foundation matures fastly. The other modules released in this train station have been adapted to these changes and thus benefit from them as well.

We've upgraded to Querydsl 3.x APIs to accomodate the changes introduced in their major release. The repositories abstraction has added support for ordering ignoring case as well as count…By…(…) projection for derived queries…

Dear Spring Community,

I'm happy to announce the release of Spring Social Twitter 1.0.5.RELEASE.

Spring Social is an extension of the Spring Framework that enables you to connect your Java applications to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as Facebook and Twitter.

Spring Social Twitter 1.0.5.RELEASE is a bug fix release that addresses a couple of bugs found since 1.0.4.RELEASE. Specifically, the following items have been fixed:

• Spring 3.0.x compatibility issue when creating a TwitterTemplate using an application token.
• Improper deserialization of the max_id property in SearchMetadata.

As with the previous release, Spring Social Twitter 1.0.5.RELEASE is being made available in anticipation of the retirement of version 1.0 of Twitter's API, scheduled to take place tomorrow, June 11, 2013.

To get the software, download the release distribution or change the Spring Social Twitter dependency in your build file to reference 1.0.5.RELEASE.

We invite you to discuss this release as well as the continuing work toward Spring Social 1.1.0 in the Spring Social Forum and to report any bugs or improvements in the Spring Social Twitter issue tracker.

Head over to the Pivotal Blog for a short primer on Hadoop programming, which walks you through a simple word count program. Learn some basics about Apache Hadoop via four coding approaches:

• using the native Hadoop library
• alternate libraries such as Pig, Hive and Cascading

Stay tuned for the next blog entry in the series, where Spring for Apache Hadoop is introduced for a beginning audience, providing a unified, consistent alternative to the four different methods discussed in this blog post.