In a press release today, SpringSource and VMware announced that the Spring 3.1 Release Train is complete. Spring Integration, Spring Security, Spring Batch, Spring Data, Spring Mobile and Spring for Android all now support Spring 3.1, making it easier and faster for enterprise developers to build the next generation of enterprise applications.

The press release also highlighted important findings from Evans Data Research regarding the growing popularity and benefits of using Spring. More than two thirds of Java developers are either using Spring today or plan to do so within the next two years and those that do use Spring are 50% more productive.

SpringSource would like to thank all of the amazing community members that made this release possible. Community contributions form an important part of many of the projects and all the users that experimented with milestone and release candidate versions help substantially in making sure that Spring technology is high quality and production ready. Work is already underway on many other exciting projects like the recently announced Spring for Apache Hadoop project. Community members are invited to attend the upcoming SpringOne on the Road events to meet the Spring experts and learn about the latest features available with Spring.

This video will provide an introductory overview of Android’s architecture, the layout of an Android project, the use of various Maven plugins and tools for enabling dependency management in your Android project. When building Android apps, you can use a third party library, like Spring for Android, that provides an abstraction for consuming RESTful services within your native Android app. Spring Android also supports the use of Spring Social on Android, and this presentation will discuss how Spring Social can help you connect your apps to OAuth protected services like Facebook and Twitter.

Be sure to thumbs up the presentation if you find it useful and subscribe to the SpringSourceDev channel to see other recordings and screencasts.

Spring Integration committer and teacher Oleg Zhurakousky demoes performing transaction management, error handling, asynchronous processing, advanced aggregator configuration,  and much more using Spring Integration and the Enterprise Integration Patterns. This talk is a chance to stand over the shoulder of a master as he tackles some frequently asked questions about Spring Integration and demonstrates the solutions in code.    

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. There is a lot to look at this week with much of the excitement around the just released Spring for Apache Hadoop project, which provides a very, very powerful Spring API integration for Apache Hadoop, an open source framework originally designed to support map-reduce style batch processing solutions.

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1. Costin Leau kicked things off with the announcement of Spring for Apache Hadoop 1.0.0.M1 last week. I can't explain it any better than Costin does, so I won't bother. From his post:

   Whether one is writing stand-alone, vanilla MapReduce applications, interacting with data from multiple data stores across the enterprise, or coordinating a complex workflow of HDFS, Pig, or Hive jobs, or anything in between, Spring for Apache Hadoop stays true to the Spring philosophy offering a simplified programming model and addresses "accidental complexity" caused by the infrastructure.

   What are you waiting for? Go! Check it out! When you're done, you might check out the other coverage of the event, as well. As you might expect, a lot of people blogged about it, too.

   	 </LI> 
   <LI> What are you guys doing in two days, on March 8th, 2012? I'll be at the Native Android Development with Spring for Android webinar that introduces native Android development practices, resource management and the Spring for Android integration library, which makes the whole process more natural for developers that wish to interface with services on the server side. 
   	 There are, as usual, two editions, one <a href= "http://www.springsource.org/node/3482">for North America</A> and <a href = "http://www.springsource.org/node/3481">one for Europe</A>. Don't miss it! 
   	</LI…

Dear Spring Community,

We're pleased to announce the new release 2.9.0 of the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). Some highlights from this release:

• ships now with just released Eclipse Indigo SR2 (3.7.2)
• updated to tc Server 2.6.3, Spring Roo 1.2.1, and Grails 2.0.1
• now includes an AspectJ 1.7.0 based AJDT
• support for Spring Integration 2.1
• support for Grails 2.0
• improved Gradle integration

More details on new features and bug fixes can be found in the New and Noteworthy document. Detailed installation instructions are also available. As always downloads are available from the STS download page.

Looking ahead, STS 3.0.0 is planned for July 2012 and will be based on Eclipse Juno (4.2).

Introduction

What is the Spring Integration Scala DSL?

The Spring Integration Scala DSL is a Domain Specific Language written in Scala with the goals of:

• providing a strongly-typed alternative to XML configuration for Spring Integration
• raising awareness about Spring Integration in Scala community
• providing first class integration with various Scala frameworks and products such as Akka
• providing seamless integration with Java where Scala developers can still leverage their existing Java investments

One thing we would like to point out is that the Spring Integration Scala DSL is not itself a new EIP framework. Rather, it's a Scala-based DSL that sits on top of the Java-based Spring Integration framework, and, in the first milestone, the DSL itself still relies heavily on Java types from the Spring Integration API. However, as it progresses through subsequent milestones, the DSL will evolve to become increasingly Scala-esque. We do believe that such close integration with the existing…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the first release candidate of the Spring for Android project is now available!

Spring for Android supports usage of the Spring Framework in a Android environment. The 1.0.0.RC1 release focuses on updating support for the latest Spring Social release in native Android applications, as well as providing enhancements to Rest Template. This includes:

• Support for Spring Social 1.0.2.RELEASE, and Spring Security 3.1.0.RELEASE through the Spring for Android Auth module, which includes a SQLite datastore for persisting OAuth API connections.
• Updated RestTemplate support, now at the level of Spring Framework 3.1.0.RELEASE.
• Added support for Basic Authentication.
• Added AssetResource for accessing static resources stored in the assets directory of an Android project.
• Removed automatic loading of GsonHttpMessageConverter due to incompatibilities with preinstalled versions of Gson on some devices.
• Improved gzip support in RestTemplate.
• Now defaulting to standard J2SE facilities (HttpURLConnection) in Gingerbread and newer, as recommended by Google.
• Disabled connection reuse on Eclair and older versions when using HttpURLConnection, because of a defect in connection pooling on those versions of Android.
• Added several additional bug fixes and improvements.

Spring for Android is supported in Android version 2.1 (API Level 7) and higher.

To get the software, download the release distribution, or simply add the maven artifacts to your project. To see the features live, check out the spring-android-showcase (updated for 1.0.0.RC1).

Dear Spring-NOSQL Community,

Since the last release of Spring Data - Neo4j we worked on a number of issues that you raised as important improvements and extensions.

Thanks to Mark Spitzler, Oliver Gierke, Rajaram Ganeshan, Laurent Pireyn for their contributions and all the other community members for the feedback and discussions.

We want to encourage you to give it a try, especially the new things and send us your feedback.

We are aware of the of issues that are still open and want to address them by the 2.1 release which is planned for the end of March - aligned with Neo4j 1.7.

If you have any questions or suggestions don't hesitate to ask on the Spring Forums, the Neo4j Google Group or by raising an issue in JIRA…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. We've got a lot of good stuff to look at, as usual.

  Since you&#39;re here, though, let&#39;s talk about the <a href="http://blog.cloudfoundry.com/post/13481010905/cloud-foundry-open-tour-2012" target="_blank">Cloud Foundry Open Tour</a>, which is an event bringing the industry&#39;s best talent and speakers on Spring, Cloud Foundry, and much more  to a town near you in America, Asia and Europe.  The full itinerary&#39;s provided on the linked page, but if you&#39;re in (or near) Shanhai, Beijing, Tokyo, London, Moscow, Kiev, San Francisco, Portland, Austin, and Washington D.C., then you should not  miss this event - <a href="http://opentour…