Today marks an important day for developers, with the public beta release of Cloud Foundry, VMware’s open source Platform as a Service offering. Rod Johnson’s blog contains a lot of background details about this exciting announcement, and Mark Fisher’s post offers a first look at the service and how easily applications can move between a local environment and the cloud. As both Rod and Mark highlight today’s announcement is about enhancing and ensuring developer productivity.

In support of this new service and platform we are pleased to announce that we have integrated Cloud Foundry support into Spring Roo - Spring’s rapid application development tool for Java developers. Now you can take Roo’s productivity to the cloud and you don’t even have to leave the shell! There are dozens of commands to make it easy to work with Cloud Foundry, and of course you can build a new application and deploy it to Cloud Foundry in just a few minutes. Once you’ve logged in, it’s as simple as using the new “cloud foundry deploy” command and…

A couple of years back, the co-founder of a startup spoke at the London Groovy and Grails User Group. I remember vividly how he said he dreamed of deploying a Grails application with "just one click". With the announcement of the new Cloud Foundry service, his dream is nearly a reality for all Grails users. Now you not only get simple and rapid development with Grails, but also simple and rapid deployment to a cloud hosting provider.

So how do Grails and Cloud Foundry work together? As long time Grails users would expect, we have a plugin for that! To demonstrate how it works I'm going to walk you through deploying a sample application, Pet Clinic, to Cloud Foundry. It's a simple application and you can see it in action on Cloud Foundry…

Dear Spring Community,

I am pleased to announce that the second milestone release of the Spring Data Document 1.0 project with MongoDB support is now available!

The primary goal of the Spring Data project is to make it easier to build Spring-powered applications that use new data access technologies such as non-relational databases, map-reduce frameworks, and cloud based data services.

The Spring Data MongoDB subproject provides integration with the MongoDB document database.

Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog

To learn more about the project, visit the Spring Data Spring Data MongoDB Page…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring CodeConfig for .NET 1.0.0 is now available.

Download | NuGet Package | Support | Documentation | Community

		<p>Note also that Spring CodeConfig for .NET is also available as <a href="http://nuget.org/List/Packages/Spring.CodeConfig" target="_new">a NuGet Package</a>.</p>

This release contains the following major features:

• Code-based configuration similar to the @Configuration support in Spring Java
• Declarative Assembly Scanning to detect Configuration Classes
• Support for mixing and matching Code-based and XML-based configuration metadata
• Extension Methods to support Code-Based Configuration on existing Application Contexts
• Bootstrapping the Context configuration from either Code-First or XML-First approaches
…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the Spring.NET Visual Studio 2010 Extension 1.0.0 is now available.

Download | Support | Documentation | Community

This release of the Spring.NET Visual Studio 2010 Extension provides Intellisense support in the following areas for editing Spring XML configuration files:

• Type completion
• Property name completion
• Constructor argument name completion
• Property value completion for property of type 'Type', 'Enum' and 'Boolean'

In addition, this release also provides for the following enhancements to the Visual Studio 2010 XML Editor experience:

• Snippets integration (inline or by menu)
• Quickinfo tooltip for properties and types

A brief screencast of this tool in action can be watched here.

This project is hosted at GitHub.

As always, we encourage feedback from the community on this and all aspects of Spring.NET!

This year is moving along at a very quick clip!

We've already seen a torrent of new and exciting releases for Spring users and just today news of perhaps the most exciting thing yet went out. If you didn't get it because you aren't, for example, a registered SpringSource Tool Suite user, then here are the salient bits:

Next Tuesday - April 12th - VMware is hosting a webinar - "Spring into the cloud!" - with the provocative explanation, "Spring has already simplified enterprise Java development. Next up is cloud development."

The webinar will be presented for both Europe and North America timezones. See this page for details, and don't…

Dear Spring Community,

I am pleased to announce the third milestone release of the Spring Data Key Value 1.0 project, with support for Redis and Riak, is now available!

Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog

This release introduces several new features for Redis, such as:

• Support for a new Redis client, RJC bringing the number of Redis connectors to three
• New object-hash (and vice-versa) mapping
• Improved exception hierarchy
• Dedicated support for SORT, SORT/GET pattern and returned bulk values

Additionally, a new sample is now available that showcases the various Spring Data features: RetwisJ a Twitter-clone based entirely on Redis.

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

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the first release candidate (1.0.0.RC1) of the Spring Data Graph 1.0 project with Neo4j support is now available!

The primary goal of the Spring Data project is to make it easier to build Spring-powered applications that use new data access technologies such as non-relational databases, map-reduce frameworks, and cloud based data services.

The Graph Neo4j module provides integration with the Neo4j graph database.

Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog

To learn more about the project, visit the Spring Neo4j Homepage.

The…

Designing a good routing topology for a highly-scalable system can be like mapping a graph. Many things need to be considered, for instance the problem, constraints of the environment, those of the messaging implementation, and performance strategies. What we often run up against is a lack of flexibility and expressivity in fitting routing to our needs. Here is where RabbitMQ stands out.

Basic Concepts

Anyone familiar with messaging in general knows the concept of routing messages from A to B. Routing can be simplistic or quite complex, and when designing a routing topology for a scalable, complex system it must be elegant. Kept clean and decoupled, components can throttle nicely with varying loads. This can be expressed as a simple map or complex graph. In its simplest form a routing topology can be expressed as nodes, for instance hierarchical nodes:

For those new to RabbitMQ or AMQP (note that Rabbit works with many protocols including STOMP, HTTP, HTTPS, XMPP, and SMTP), here are some basic component descriptions:

• Exchange The entity within the server which receives messages from producer applications and optionally routes these to message queues within the server
• Exchange type The algorithm and implementation of a particular model of exchange. In contrast to the "exchange instance", which is the entity that receives and routes messages within the server
• Message queue A named entity that holds messages and forwards them to consumer applications
• Binding An entity that creates a relationship between a message queue and an exchange
• Routing key A virtual address that an exchange may use to decide how to route a specific message

For point-to-point routing, the routing key is usually the name of a message queue. For topic pub-sub routing the routing key is usually hierarchical in nature:

api.agents.agent-{id}.operations.{operationName}

In more complex cases the routing key may be combined with routing on message header fields and/or its content. An exchange examines a message's properties, header fields, body content, and possibly data from other sources, then decides how to route the message. A binding pattern derived from the above routing key idea might look like api.agents..operations. where we bind exchange E1 to queue Q1 with binding pattern api.agents..operations. so that any messages sent to E1 route to Q1…