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.

I'm pleased to announce the release of Spring Data REST 1.0.0.RC3! This release includes a significant number of bug fixes, changes to the structure of the JSON representation, better integration of user-defined Jackson Modules that are bootstrapped into the internal ObjectMapper, as well integration with Spring HATEOAS. Also included in this release is support for extending the resource representation (e.g. to add links to other, related resources) using the Spring HATEOAS ResourceProcessor abstraction.

New functionality includes:

• JSON output looks different in an effort to make property names consistent and structure clearer.
• Pulls in any Jackson Module beans discovered and integrates user configuration with internal ObjectMapper.
• Integration with Spring HATEOAS - Customize the outgoing JSON by adding or removing links or otherwise altering the resource.

Starter Web Application | Wiki | Release Notes

To learn more about the project, visit the Spring Data REST homepage, or visit the Github repository…

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the first milestone release 3.1.0.M1 of the Spring Tool Suite (STS) and the Groovy/Grails Tool Suite (GGTS).

Highlights from this milestone include:

• We now provide distributions based on Eclipse 3.8 and Eclipse 4.2
• Mylyn updated to 3.8.1
• Mac apps now signed for Gatekeeper in OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion
• Maven support for Grails projects

Some of our users reported general performance issues with the new Eclipse Juno 4.2 platform that STS 3.0.0 ships with. Most of these issues seem to be related to the underlying UI platform and its usage from various plugins and extensions. Since our goal is to provide the best possible user experience, we decided to provide two separate distributions for STS 3.1.0.M1: one that is built on top of…

The second milestone release toward Spring Framework 3.2 is now available from the SpringSource repository. If you're not already familiar, see our quick tutorial on resolving these artifacts via Maven. The complete distribution zip is available as usual from the SpringSource community download site.

Be sure to catch up on the changes in 3.2 M1 if you haven't already.

Highlights from 3.2 M2 include:

• Asynchronous @Controller method support now complete (blog post)
• Many additional Spring MVC improvements, including plenty of REST support, e.g. content negotiation.
• Spring TestContext improvements
• Spring Expression Language (SpEL) improvements and fixes
• Overall, 45 bugs fixed, 11 new features and 58 improvements implemented.

A major area of focus for 3.2 is ensuring that Spring Framework runs flawlessly on JDK7. M2 artifacts have been built, tested and published against JDK7 and we continue to test JDK6 compatibility in nightly builds as well. We encourage all Spring users on JDK7 to give M2 a spin in your development and test environments and provide as much feedback as possible prior to 3.2 GA. Thanks!

Users of @Configuration classes and Spring's support for subclass proxies (proxy-target-class=true), please take note: it is now no longer necessary to add CGLIB as an explicit dependency to work with these features. As of 3.2 M2, we have upgraded to the new CGLIB 3.0. We repackage all net.sf.cglib classes to org.springframework.cglib and inline them directly within the spring-core JAR. This means that all @Configuration and subclass proxying functionality works out of the box in M2, and means no potential for CGLIB conflicts with other projects. Likewise, we have upgraded to the new ASM 4.0, which we continue to repackage and inline as we have done for quite some time now. Note however that we've eliminated the dedicated spring-asm jar in M2 in favor of including org.springframework.asm classes directly in spring-core. Both of these upgrades are good news for JDK7 users writing Spring components in dynamic JVM languages, as these new versions of CGLIB and ASM properly handle the new invokedynamic bytecode instruction introduced in JDK7.

Enjoy!

Download | Documentation | Javadoc API | Change Log | JIRA | Forum | Stack Overflow

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! I'm off to Oslo, Norway for the JavaZone conference to talk to people about using Spring Integration and Spring Batch on top of Cloud Foundry. Again, this is a natural use case: Cloud Foundry makes it easy to scale to handle the largest workloads, and Spring Integration and Spring Batch, presumably sitting on top of RabbitMQ, take care of the plumbing and do the heavy lifting of workload distribution across the cluster.

 <P>Wrapping up from last week's Cloud Foundry   Open Tour - India, touring <a href="http://opentour.cloudfoundry…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce the release of Spring Social Facebook 1.0.2!

This release primarily adjusts Spring Social Facebook's API binding to some recent and upcoming changes in the Facebook Graph API. Specifically:

• The "picture" field of many objects in the Facebook's Graph API is changing from a simple string containing the URL to an object with additional information about the picture. Spring Social Facebook's API binding has been changed to handle either form and return the URL string.
• The "likes" field of the Graph API's Comment object has been renamed to "like_count". Spring Social Facebook's API binding has been changed to bind to the new "like_count" field.
• The picture property of Page, Post, and Video has been deprecated. While it will still return the URL string for a picture in 1.0.2, this property will be replaced in Spring Social Facebook 1.1.0 with one that returns an object with more complete metadata about the picture.
• The position property of the Photo object has been deprecated, as this property will no longer be populated by the Facebook Graph API. This property will be removed in Spring Social Facebook 1.1.0.

To get the software, download the release distribution or simply add/update the maven artifacts to your project:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.social</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-social-facebook</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.2.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

We are continuing to monitor any changes that Facebook may apply in their graph API and if an adjustment in Spring Social Facebook's API binding is required, will release followup maintenance releases with those adjustments. We are also looking ahead to the 1.1.0 release of Spring Social, Spring Social Twitter, and Spring Social Facebook with some exciting new features in the coming months. We invite you to participate in the discussion in the Spring Social forum, in the issue tracker (Core|Facebook|Twitter), or at GitHub (Core|Facebook|Twitter).

Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring, VMWorld edition! We're at the VMWorld event, talking to developers about Spring and Cloud Foundry. There's been a lot of exciting news coming out of this event, including some interesting updates around vFabric and updates regarding the timelines for Cloud Foundry itself: CloudFoundry.com, the hosted PaaS from VMware, will be GA by end-of-year, and next year will see the availability of a private on-premise Cloud Foundry. Both vFabric and Cloud Foundry are ideal environments for your Spring applications, and it's nice to see these platforms evolve.

1. Oliver Gierke has announced that the Spring Data Release Train has reached the station! This release is an umbrella release of several projects that provides uniformity across the various modules.

   	This release includes Spring Data Commons 1.4.0.RC1, Spring Data JPA 1.2.0.RC1, 
   	Spring Data MongoDB 1.1.0.RC1, Spring Data Neo4j 2.1.0.RC3 and Spring Data Gemfire 1.2.0.RC1.
   	
   	
   	  </LI>
   <LI> Gunnar Hillert has a nice blog introducing how to <a href = "http://blog.springsource.org/2012/08/23/spring-integration-extensions/">bootstrap custom Spring Integration adapter development.</a>
   	 
   	 </LI>
   
   <LI>  Gary Russel has announced that the latest iteration of  <a href  = "http://www.springsource.org/node/3639">Spring Integration, 2.2.0M4, is now available</a>.  Gary, a very busy man indeed…

I was thrilled to see in a recent survey from zeroturnaround that Spring MVC was voted the most popular web framework for Java.

This framework is very flexible and there are dozens of ways to use it. As with all flexible frameworks that have many options, it is important to discuss common practices.

The project I have created for this blog entry uses features common in many Spring MVC applications. You will find something like this:

In controllers you will find typical Spring MVC features for mapping requests, extracting request data through annotations, data binding, file upload…

On the…

#spring #batch 2.1.9.RELEASE is available (download github http://bit.ly/NYXItL or Maven central). Thanks to all contributors!

It's mostly bugfixes for 2.1.8, plus a few interesting additions (e.g. nested tasklets from any namespace to support Spring Hadoop): http://static.springsource.org/sprin...1.8-2.1.9.html.

The first real commit for 2.2 came in as a pull request. Nice work! Please keep them coming.