It’s JavaOne time again and this year you’ll find sessions on how Spring works with Java SE to address Big Data, NoSQL, and enterprise integration challenges. We’ve always worked hard to ensure that Spring remains at the forefront of enterprise Java by providing timely support for emerging trends and technologies. The numbers suggest that our users appreciate this. A recent report from Evans Data ("Spring Source Usage Study," Evans Data Corporation, September 2011) shows:

• Spring is the framework of choice among expert Java developers. More than two thirds of Java developers are either using Spring today or planning to do so
• Spring usage continues to grow. More than half of existing Spring users expect to grow or significantly grow their use of Spring.
• Spring is delivering results. 70% of Spring users indicate at least a 50% productivity gain by using Spring and 73% indicate at least a 50% time reduction to deliver a completed project.
• Spring users are at the forefront of enterprise Java. Spring users are more cloud ready, and Spring adopters are more likely to have already deployed applications to the cloud.

Spring has always offered deployment flexibility. In the early days this meant a choice of application servers, but now this extends to choice of cloud platforms including our own Cloud Foundry. Spring has always provided strong data access support. In the early days this meant a choice of approaches for accessing a relational database, today this extends to a range of Big Data and NoSQL stores, data processing, and in-memory data grid capabilities. Spring has always valued developer productivity and provided first class support for writing server-side web applications. Today this extends to meet the modern requirements of HATEOAS-based REST APIs.

These are real and pressing concerns within the enterprise today. Cloud is everywhere, and now Big Data is firmly on the enterprise project radar too, creating a range of new requirements:

• Big Data: the need to store and get analytics from gigabytes, terabytes or petabytes of unstructured or semi-structured data
• Fast Data: the increasing need for low latency interactions with large sets of data, often driven by today’s mobile and social apps
• Flexible Data: the need to adapt data access to the most appropriate model for each application
• Cloud Delivery: the growing demand to access data as a service, provisioned on the cloud of your choice.

The latest Harvard Business Review survey indicates that 85% of organizations have Big Data initiatives planned or in progress. Application developers need to deliver capable, high quality solutions that integrate with this new world and can be deployed anywhere, on or off premise. NoSQL and NewSQL are also being used to address a wide range of use cases including:

• Managing large data streams of non-transactional data (logs, clickstreams)
• Fraud detection
• Timelines (a la Twitter)
• Synching offline and online data
• Online gaming
• Document, catalog and content management
• Archiving - storing a large continual stream of data that is still accessible on-line
• Embedded systems (small footprint databases in devices)

See this High Scalability blog entry for more details.

451 Research’s recent survey data highlights the changing shape of the data landscape. One size no longer fits all.

Enterprise developers can start taking advantage of these new technologies today with Spring and the familiar Spring programming model. Spring offers:

• Big Data processing via Spring Data’s support for Apache Hadoop and HBase, as well as Spring Batch and Spring Integration
• In-Memory data grid support via Spring Data GemFire
• Support for NoSQL key-value stores with Spring Data Redis
• Support for NoSQL document stores with Spring Data MongoDB
• Support for NoSQL graph databases with Spring Data Neo4j
• Support for NewSQL databases with SQLFire
• And of course traditional relational databases, such as MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, and DB2, still have their place and can be accessed via Spring JPA and Spring JDBC Extensions, and made accessible via Spring Data REST

The thriving open source community around NoSQL, together with Spring, makes developing for the next generation of data stores and data processing more productive today. We don’t provide a single Java API for all persistence stores; this is not realistic given the fundamental differences between them. But we do provide a common and familiar programming model based on the concepts of templates and, where available, repositories. See Tobias Trelle’s recent InfoQ article for more details.

All in all, JavaOne 2012 is sure to be an action packed week, full of great Java tech talks, keynotes, and sessions including coverage of our own Big Data, NoSQL, and integration initiatives. Developers who want to get hands on with these technologies now also won't want to miss SpringOne 2GX in Washington DC October 15-18, 2012. We have a packed technical agenda covering all aspects of modern enterprise application development.

A second milestone of the Spring MVC Test project is now available through the SpringSource Artifactory repository http://repo.springsource.org/milestone.

There is much that's new. On the server side we've added support for servlet filters, basic support for Spring Security, the ability to define default request properties and expectations to re-use across every performed request, and much more. On the client side we've greatly expanded the options for request matching and response creation.

For further details and comments read this blog post.

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring! There's so much good stuff to look at this week. Can you believe we're already staring down October?

It's time to think about who or what you are going to be for halloween!

With October comes SpringOne2GX, the premier event for Spring developers. Check out the final schedule of speakers and sessions for this year's event! SpringOne 2GX is your opportunity to learn from development leads and published authors on the Spring, Groovy/Grails, Tomcat and Cloud technologies.

1. The video from Spring Security lead Rob Winch's webinar introducing Spring Security is now available.
2. Oleg Zhurakousky kicks off the march to Spring Integration 2.2 with a blog introducing the new MongoDB features in 2.2.
3. Gary Russell has announced release candidate 1 of Spring Integration 2.2.

         This is intended to be the final release before GA, so users are encouraged to give feedback on this release.  
   
   </LI>
   

4. Costin Leau has announced the 1.0.0.RC1 release of Spring Shell, which is an extraction of the shell used in Spring Roo and made available through the Spring programming model.

      </LI>
   

5. Roger Hughes is back at it again, this time with a look at Spring 3.1 caching and configuration options, specifically focusing on setting up a CacheManager.
6. The vFabric blog has an interesting look at the "split-agent" architecture behind Spring Insight, that allows the separation of the collection stage from the analysis one.
7. Krishna Prasad has a nice post on obtaining test coverage information for Spring Web Flow applications.
8. Mattias Severson has a nice post on handling errors in Spring MVC-based RESTful application.
9. Ronillo Ang's put together a very brief deck on the fundamental pieces of a Spring MVC application.
10. The JavaCode Geeks blog has a nice post on writing persistence layers with the Spring framework.
11. L'Artech blog has a cool post on creating the login form for a web application using Spring MVC, in part 3 of a series.

Introduction

This is the second part in a series of blog posts highlighting some of the new features available in Spring Integration 2.2 following the recent release of Release Candidate 1. The first part talks about the MongoDB adapters.

Spring Integration 2.2 introduces extended support for synchronizing non-transactional resources with transactions.

Background

Spring has provided first class support for synchronizing resources with transactions for many years. In many cases, this facility is used to synchronize transactions managed by multiple transaction managers, in order to implement the 'Best Efforts 1PC' pattern described in Dave Syer's excellent JavaWorld article.

It is often used, for example, to synchronize a JMS commit with a JDBC commit.

Spring Integration has long supported this feature, by defining a <transactional/> element on a poller. This release takes this feature one step further, by allowing synchronization of non-transactional resources with a transaction.

For example, consider a <file:inbound-channel-adapter/> and an Integration application that reads a file when it appears in a directory, and updates a database. This…

Introduction

Spring Integration 2.2.RC1 is out and we will be coming out with a set of blogs in the coming days discussing some of its new features. In this first blog we'll talk about MongoDb Inbound and Outbound Channel Adapters. Full set of discussed samples is available here

MongoDb Outbound Channel Adapter

MongoDb Outbound Channel Adapter allows you to write the Message payload to a MongoDb document store.

You can see the simplest configuration of the MongoDb Channel Adapter below:

<int-mongodb:outbound-channel-adapter id="deafultAdapter"/>

It will be initialized with the default instance of the MongoDbFactory (the default bean name is 'mongoDbFactory') otherwise you can provide its reference via mongodb-factory attribute.

Now you can run the MongoDbOutboundAdapterDemo. After running it open terminal window and start MongoDb CLI

$> mongo

Once in MongoDb CLI type a query:

> db.data.find({})

And you should see the 3 document entries we just created:

{ "_id" : ObjectId("505ff83d03649ed6881d…

Spring Integration 2.2.0.RC1 - the release candidate for the 2.2 stream, including a number of important features and improvements, is now available. Barring major issues, we expect to make the final release shortly, so users are encouraged to try out the new features, some of which are described here. Over the next week or so, we intend to release a number of blog posts highlighting some of these features and others.

• Release notes are available here. The issues listed there are closed, in addition to those in milestones 1 through 4.
• Artifacts are available in the SpringSource repo and the community download page.

More information is available on the project's home page.

Dear Spring Community,

I am pleased to announce the first release candidate for Spring Shell project! Spring Shell is an interactive shell that can be easily extended with commands using a Spring based programming model, extracted from the Spring Roo project.

Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog

This release contains various fixes related to JLine/Jansi. See the changelog for detailed info.

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

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois talking to StateFarm about Spring Projects: MVC, REST, Mobile, and Android. The developers here are code ninjas. Listening to their internal talks over the course of the day has been eye opening, to say the least. Don't miss the Spring, Groovy and Grails event of the year in Washington, DC: SpringOne2GX. If you haven't already registered, now's the time! Oh, and don't forget, if you're in the United States, today is national cheeseburger day! So... bon appetit!

<LI> Chris Beams has announced the availability of <a href ="http://www.springsource.org/node/3654">Spring Framework 3.2 M2</a>, which features many new features including improved <CODE>TestContext</CODE> support, Spring MVC improvements, asynchronous <CODE>@Controllers</CODE>, and lots of bug-fixes and improvements.  </LI>
<LI> This month's SpringSource webinar is coming fast - <a href ="http://www.springsource.org/node/3653"> Spring Security with Rob Winch</a>. Be sure to register now! </LI>
<li> Martin Lippert has announced the availability  of the <a href="http://www.springsource.org…

Shortly before the Spring Data GA release train arrives, we would like to gather some feedback on fixes and updates in Spring Data - Neo4j. That's why we released an Release Candidate 4.

Here is a quick overview of the changes that made it into this release candidate, much longer than we intended to, but still very useful.

Changes in version 2.1.0.RC4 (2012-08-19)

• DATAGRAPH-296 Updates to stable versions of Neo4j 1.8.RC1, spatial, cypher-dsl and java-rest-binding, adopted to API changes
• DATAGRAPH-285 adding application events for save and delete
• DATAGRAPH-263, DATAGRAPH-212, DATAGRAPH-272, DATAGRAPH-147 refactored derived query creation, added support for multiple indexed fields and all query keywords
• DATAGRAPH-294 derived finder methods for numerically indexed values
• DATAGRAPH-293 find objects by graph-id
• DATAGRAPH-275 non graceful fallback on empty graph for TypeRepresentationStrategyFactory
• DATAGRAPH-246 allowing entity as parameter to derived finders
• DATAGRAPH-281 Added support for Enums and Dates as parameters to Cypher

Just point your dependency version to 2.1.0.RC4. For now the online resources have not been updated due to manual effort and time constraints. Those will be available for the 2.1.0.RELEASE.