What happens once your application moves to production? During development, losing the data in between server runs isn't a big issue. But you can't just drop the database in production. So that rules out the "create" and "create-drop" values for the dbCreate data source…

I'm pleased to announce that we just released the first milestone build for the next release of the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS).

This milestone brings mostly some updates and new features for Groovy&Grails developers, including:

• update to tc Server Developer Edition 2.5.1
• update to Maven 3.0.3
• update to Mylyn 3.6.1
• runs on JDK 1.7.0, including Spring Roo 1.1.5
• validation and quick-fixes for constructor-arg
• support for Grails 2.0.0.M1
• enhanced DSL support for Grails 2.0.0.M1
• lot of improvements for Groovy-Eclipse

More details can be found in the New and Noteworthy for 2.8.0.M1 document. Detailed installation instructions are also available, please look at the installation from the milestone update sites.

As always downloads are available from the STS download page, check "Other Downloads".

2.8.0.M2 is planned for the second half of September, followed…

The whole point of a FactoryBean is to hide the construction of an object - either because it's very complex or because it can't simply be instantiated using the typical constructor-centric approach used by the Spring container (maybe it needs to be looked up? Maybe it needs a static registry method?) Spring has also supported the factory-method attribute in the XML format. The Java configuration approach offers a conceptually similar (in practice, the result is the same) alternative, but features a more concise, type-safe alternative.

Spring 3.0 saw the introduction of Java configuration which lets you define beans using Java. For instance, to register a regular javax.sql.DataSource with Spring in XML, you will more than likely delegate to a properties file for the sensitive configuration information (like a database password) and use Spring to instantiate the javax.sql.DataSource, like this:

<beans ...>
	<context:property-placeholder location = "ds.properties" />

	<bean id = "ds" class = "a.b.c.MySqlDataSource">
	  <property name = "user" value = "${ds.user}"/>
	  <property name = "password" value = "${ds.password}"/>
	</bean>
</beans>

This is a simple bean, and translates naturally into Java configuration. It would look like this:

 
import a.b.c.* ;
	
@Configuration 
@PropertySource("ds.properties") 
public class MyConfiguration { 
    @Inject private Environment env ; 
	
    @Bean public MySqlDataSource ds(){ 
        MySqlDataSource ds = new MySqlDataSource () ; 
        ds.setUser( env.getProperty("ds.user") );
        ds.setPassword( env.getProperty("ds.password…

public interface FactoryBean<T> {
  T getObject() throws Exception;
  Class<T> getObjectType();
  boolean isSingleton();
}

A FactoryBean is a pattern to encapsulate interesting object construction logic in a class. It might be used, for example, to encode the construction of a complex object graph in a reusable way. Often this is used to construct complex objects that have many dependencies. It might also be used when the construction logic itself is highly volatile and depends on the configuration. A FactoryBean is also useful to help Spring construct objects that it couldn't easily construct itself. For example, in order to inject a reference to a bean that was obtained from JNDI, the reference must first be obtained. You can use the JndiFactoryBean to obtain this reference in a consistent way. You may inject the result of a FactoryBean's getObject() method into any other property.

Suppose you have a Person class whose definition is thus:

public class Person { 
 private Car car ;
 private void setCar(Car car){ this.car = car;  }	
}

and a FactoryBean whose definition is thus:

public class MyCarFactoryBean implements FactoryBean<Car>{
  private String make; 
  private int year ;

  public void setMake(String m){ this.make =m ; }

  public void setYear(int y){ this.year = y; }

  public Car getObject(){ 
    // wouldn't be a very useful FactoryBean 
    // if we could simply instantiate the object…

The What's Next conference in Paris in May was one of the biggest Java events ever organized in France, energizing the vibrant French developer community. It gathered a lot of the most important Java experts from around the world to discuss at a high level the important new and emerging technologies around the Java platform.

SpringSource's Adrian Colyer had the opportunity to present to the audience and he discussed the current trends in cloud computing, covering especially PaaS with a reference at Cloud Foundry, and focusing on how PaaS impacts enterprise application design and development.

Many thanks to InfoQ who were on hand to capture the presentation.

1. Rod Johnson - Spring's founder and thought leader - did a keynote at TheServerSide earlier this year. This post relays some of the content of that keynote, including his thoughts on cloud computing, SOA, and more. Check it out.

<LI> 
	The video of the recent webinar, "<A href="http://www.springsource.org/node/3194">What's New in Apache Tomcat 7</a>," is now available on the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/SpringSourceDev">SpringSourceDev YouTube channel</a>.   
</LI> 
<LI>Luke Taylor has some great content on how to <a href="http://blog.springsource.com/2011/08/01/spring-security-configuration-with-scala/">configure Spring Security with the Scala DSL</a> he's been developing. Check it out! 
</LI> 
<LI> 
	<a href= "http://www.springsource.org/node/3192">Spring Data JDBC Extensions with Oracle Database Support</a>…