What a great week! The Cloud Foundry Open Tour's well under way, having just finished the Asian and US legs of the tour. Now, onward to Europe! (If you're in Europe, now's the time to secure your spot!)

Before we continue on to the bevy of the latest and greatest content, I wanted to remind you guys to check out Spring Integration ninja Oleg Zhurakousky's upcoming webinar, Practical Tips for Spring Integration. There is, as usual, one event for North America, and one for Europe

1. Gunnar Hillert's put together a blog introducing a feature that's received a lot of attention in SpringSource Tool Suite: easy-to-use templates for creating Spring Integration projects. Nice job, Gunnar! Also, check out Gunnar's accompanying video Create Spring Integration Projects with STS on the SpringSource YouTube channel.
2. Michael Isvy has put together a great blog explaining a few of the things you should be aware of when upgrading to Spring 3.1. Handy!

 <LI> Spring Integration 2.1.1 has been released! This is the first maintenance release of 2.1.x branch and contains the usual things like bug fixes and improvements related to AMQP, Gemfire, Mongo and Redis modules which were first introduced in Spring Integration 2.1.0. All together 56 issues were resolved with this release. 
	 For more, consult <a href = "http://www.springsource.org/node/3520">the release announcement</A>.</LI>
		
<LI>  Gabriel Axel talks about the <a href = "http://www.gabiaxel.com/2012/04/spring-social-google-first-milestone-is.html">first milestone of Spring Social…

Just days ago, SpringSource Tool Suite™ (STS) 2.9.1 was released. Besides many new features, it provides several features that are especially exciting for Spring Integration users. First of all, the latest STS release adds support for Spring Integration 2.1 and improves the visualization capabilities for Spring Integration flows. STS supports now all recently added Spring Integration adapters such as:

• Redis
• Gemfire
• AMQP
• Stored Procedure

• Spring Integration Project (Standalone) - Simple
• Spring Integration Project (Standalone) - File
• Spring Integration Project (War)

Creating a new Spring Integration Project

[caption id="attachment_10681" align="aligncenter" width="342" caption="The Template Selection Screen"][/caption]

This screen provides a list of all available Spring Templates, including the 3 previously mentioned new templates for Spring Integration. If you see that little arrow in front of the template name - that means that the actual template has not been downloaded, yet. Once downloaded, the Templates will be cached on your machine and you won’t need to download the template files again, unless you press the Refresh…

The Spring Integration team is pleased to announce the release of Spring Integration 2.1.1.RELEASE. This is the first maintenance release of 2.1.x branch and contains the usual things like bug fixes and improvements related to AMQP, Gemfire, Mongo and Redis modules which were first introduced in Spring Integration 2.1.0. All together 56 issues were resolved with this release.

Download | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Release Notes

To learn more about the project, visit the Spring Integration homepage, watch the introduction video or ask a question on the forum.

Welcome to another Installment of This Week in Spring The Cloud Foundry Open Tour is well underway, and have been thus far very good events to attract community.

There are still some (well, there were yesterday!) early bird spots in the upcoming shows in <a href = "http://opentour.cloudfoundry.com/2012/austin">Austin</A>, <a href = "http://opentour.cloudfoundry.com/2012/washington">Washington D.C.</a>, <a href = "http://opentour.cloudfoundry.com/2012/kiev">Kiev</A>, <a href = "http://opentour.cloudfoundry.com/2012/moscow">Moscow</A>, and <a href  = "http://opentour.cloudfoundry.com/2012/london">London</A>, so book now. 

1. Some of the wonderful content from the Spring I/O conference is now available online! The conference, held in Spain in February of this year, is conducted in both Spanish and English, so there's a lot to like no matter which language you speak. Adrian Colyer's keynote session is super, once you get past the audio problems at the beginning. I couldn't find a SpringIO-specific hash tag, but you can pick them out of the other videos pretty easily by scrolling down. Stay tuned, there should be even more content posted, soon.

 <LI> Tobias Fiohre (who  seemingly lives  <EM>only</Em> to please us, the lucky developers in the  Spring community!)  has put up…

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring. As usual, we have a lot to cover. As this post goes up, the Cloud Foundry Open Tour is underway in Beijing, and coming to a city near you, soon. This show's a very unique opportunity to learn more about Cloud Foundry and Spring from the experts - don't miss out, register today.

1. Spring web dude Rossen Stoyanchev announced that Spring Web Flow 2.3.1 has been released. This is a maintenance release featuring an upgrade to Spring 3.1.1, and JavaServer Faces 2.1.7 along with a number of bug fixes.
2. SpringSource Tool Suite lead Martin Lippert announced the release of the Cloud Foundry Integration for Eclipse 1.0. This release brings a complete, cohesive Cloud Foundry integration for all Eclipse distributions, including the SpringSource Tool Suite.
3. Martin also announced the release of SpringSource Tool Suite release, 2.9.1, featuring new features and bug fixes.

<LI>    <a href = "http://www.springone2gx.com/conference/speaker/mark_fisher">Mark Fisher</A> and <a href = "http://www.springone2gx.com/conference/speaker/thomas_risberg">Thomas Risberg</A>'s epic talk from <a href = "http://www.springone2gx.com">SpringOne 2GX 2011</A>  - <EM><A href = "http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Architecture-Choices-for-Scalable-Cloud-Apps">Architecture Choices for Scalable Cloud Apps</A></EM> -  that introduces how to build scalable architectures in the cloud using technologies like Spring Integration and Cloud Foundry is now up on InfoQ. 
	  </LI>
	

4. Maciej Walkowiak has a blog that introduces how to use Spring 3.1 profiles in conjunction with some custom Tomcat configuration to activate Spring profiles without changing the deployed binary.
5. Michal Jastak has put together a wonderful post introducing how to use Spring MVC 3.1's support for flash attributes.
6. Tobias Flohre is at it again, this time with two posts on Spring Batch. The first post introduces the basics of transactions in Spring Batch, and the second post introduces some of the finer points of restarting cursor-based readers and writers.

    </LI> 
   

7. Artur Mkrtchyan has a great post introducing both how to install Redis (a fast, highly optimized data-structure server) and how to use Spring Data Redis (part of the Spring Data umbrella project that facilitates access to the wide varieties of so-called NoSQL and big-data stores) to build Spring applications that talk to Redis.
…

Introduction

Among those are a number of things which simplify the complicated and tedious problems often associated with data binding. In general, data binding is made very simple by Grails as it offers several techniques for binding maps of data to graphs of objects.

It is important that application developers understand the implications of each of those techniques in order to decide which is most appropriate and most secure for any given use case.

Web Application Data Binding Overview

Consider a domain class which looks something like this:

Code Listing 1

class Employee {
    String firstName
    String lastName
    BigDecimal salary
}

There might be…

Spring Web Flow 2.3.1 is now available for download. This maintenance release includes an upgrade to Spring 3.1.1, JavaServer Faces 2.1.7 along with a number of bug fixes. For those tracking the project it is now hosted on Github including a separate issue repository to help reproduce issues based on one of several project templates.

Dear Spring Community,

We're pleased to announce the update release 2.9.1 of the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS).

This update improves the Spring Integration graphical editing experience and fixes a performance problem with the content-assist in the Java editor when working inside a Spring project.

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.

I am happy to announce the first release of the Cloud Foundry Integration for Eclipse 1.0.

This release features:

• deploying, updating, starting, stopping apps directly from your workspace
• supports Java/Web, Java/Spring, Groovy/Grails and Scala/Lift apps
• service creating and binding (directly at deploy time or later)
• instance scaling and statistics
• remote file browsing directly integrated
• full debugging support for Micro Cloud Foundry
• improved incremental update performance
• integrated into Eclipse and STS

And, last but not least, the project is now open-source under the EPL and available from GitHub: https://github.com/SpringSource/eclipse-integration-cloudfoundry

You can install it into STS (2.9.0 or higher required) using the STS Dashboard or directly into a plain Eclipse JEE package (Indigo recommended) using the Eclipse Marketplace.

Attention: if you have a previous version of the Cloud Foundry tooling installed (the old milestone or nightly builds, having the old STS version…