Asynchronous applications can sometimes be a challenge while you're developing them since you usually need two separate components to see the full message publication and consumption lifecycle. It often happens that you write a consumer that can dump messages to System.out or your log file, just so you can make sure your publisher is doing the right thing. It would be really handy if you could mock the message publication and consumption interaction in a single component so you could actually see what's going on.

The RabbitMQ Groovy DSL aims to help with this by providing a very concise and…

The excitement continues today at the SpringSource S2G forums here in London! The energy leading up to the event has been staggering, and the talks - on a wide variety of deep, technical topics - are very impressive! I've had several of my questions answered, and learned a lot about some of the new, interesting, upcoming technologies from SpringSource. If you didn't get a chance to attend this year, we will be posting the session slides next week. Also don't forget, there is still SpringOne 2GX later this year (October) in Chicago!

1. Many people love Spring Batch as soon as they give it a try, and many of those people then start trying to tell others about it precisely because it's so wonderful to know that they won't have to solve the problem themselves. Batch processing's something we all do at some point or another: moving data from database to another, reading from a file system, making web service calls and need to handle retry logic, etc. These use cases (and many more) are natural fits for Spring Batch. If you want to see one very succinct, useful introduction to the technology with an emphasis on code, check out Sanjoy Kumar Roy's blog introducing Spring Batch. Very cool! If you give Spring Batch a try and feel like you have something to add to the discussion, write a blog and ping me to let me know so I can highlight it on this page!.

	<li>
		Roy Clarkson notes that starting May 28, 2011, the repositories for <a href="http://www.springsource.org/spring-android">Spring Android</a> and <A HREF ="http://www.springsource.org/spring-mobile">Spring Mobile</a> have moved to GitHub, and are available at the following URLs:

	<div><b>Spring Android:<br/></b>
		<UL><li><a href="https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-android">Spring Android</a></li>
		<LI><A href="https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-android-samples">Spring Android Samples</a>
			</li> </div>
				<div><b>Spring Mobile:<br/></b>
					<UL><li><a href="https…

What a week! Excitement is in the air as we near the S2G Forums here in Amsterdam on the 26th and then next week in London on the 31st of May. If you're in Europe, be sure not to miss these exciting, jam-packed days with talks on all manner of topics including Spring, Grails, the cloud, big data and of course tooling.

1. Mark Fisher and Ramnivas Laddad presented their hit webinar - "From Zero to Cloud in 60 Minutes" - on Cloud Foundry last week. Thank you all for attending and making it a success! If you missed it, you can still get the slides and watch the replay here. Note that there are, as usual, lots of other resources there once you're done with the CloudFoundry webinar. Check out the other developer webinars (scroll down, click on the "Developers" tab), and check out the SpringSource Dev YouTube page.
2. Juergen Hoeller, the Spring project lead, presented on the next generation of Spring -- Spring 3.1 and beyond, at QCon London earlier this year. His talk and slides are available on InfoQ.com
3. The video for the Getting Started with Spring Data Graph webinar is available, as well. This webinar introduces the Spring Data Graph project - a joint effort between the Spring and Neo4j engineering teams to bring first-class support for Neo4J to your Spring applications. If you want a more natural way to integrate the NOSQL data technologies in your existing architecture, simply want more speed, or want to see what you're missing, then you should definitely check this webinar out.
4. In a fantastic example of eating ones own dogfood, Mark Thomas - Tomcat committer and Apache Bug tracking infrastructure maintainer - explains how the Apache JIRA interface was being whelmed - not overwhelmed, but still running inefficiently - by search engines that hit specific JIRAs, but didn't maintain a session cookie, triggering the creation of numerous sessions. Mark describes the creation of a custom Valve for Tomcat 7 (and SpringSource's tcServer) that associates a single Tomcat session with each web crawler, greatly reducing their footprint.
5. Spring Web Services 2.0.2 has been released. For more information, see the change log. Spring Web Services 1.5.1.0 has also been released. For the changes in this release, please see the changelog. Both releases include some worthy updates in of themselves, but, importantly, both also resolve a potential security issue. It is recommended that users upgrade as soon as possible.

<LI> Google I/O, Google's developer conference, is an exciting time for enterprise Java developers, and of course, this also means Spring developers. One notable announcement was the <a href="http://vaadin.com/springroo">1.0 release of the Spring Roo plugin for Vaadin,</a> which is a widget-centric approach to web application development.  Vaadin's a very innovative way to build web applications today, and - of course - <a href="http://vaadin.com/wiki/-/wiki/Main/Spring%20Integration">it works well with Spring.</a> (NB: those instructions are old, but they should still work, and you can just…

May's well underway and all the preparations for the S2G Forums in Amsterdam and London are complete. These S2G Forums are the premiere place for people in Europe to get access to the best information related to the Spring community (at a minimum cost!). I hope we'll see you in Amsterdam (May 26, 2011 - € 114 ) and / or London (May 31, 2011 - £ 99)!

In the interim, those of you that want an even better picture of how the Spring framework plays on the nascent CloudFoundry open-source cloud PaaS project should be sure to attend a webinar - Spring from Zero to Cloud in 60 minutes for both North America and Europe in just 10 short days!

1. SpringSource Tool Suite 2.6.1 Released. This release features the usual updates and features. Some particularly notable features: an updated bundled version of vFabric tc Server, version 2.5, improved support for tc Server instance creation and an update to the latest release of Spring Roo, version 1.1.3 and (yay!) bundled support for CloudFoundry. Check out the New and Noteworthy PDF document for the details.

	<li> The  <A HREF="http://blog.cloudfoundry.com/">CloudFoundry blog</a> has run two different parts with a detailed look at  what happens when you <code>push</code> applications to the CloudFoundry project. The first post details what happens from the <a href="http://blog.cloudfoundry.com/post/4737632136/what-happens-when-you-vmc-push-an-application-to-cloud">client-side perspective</a>. The second post provides details on what happens from <a href="http://blog.cloudfoundry.com/post/5223861703/how-cloud-foundry-works-when-a-new-application-is">the cloud-side perspective, once the…

Dear Spring Community,

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

Appearing shortly after the 2.6.1 maintenance release, this milestone brings mostly new features for Groovy&Grails developers, including:

• Groovy 1.8 support
• Conditional breakpoints for Groovy
• Search inside GSPs
• Early access Gradle support

More details can be found in the New and Noteworthy for 2.7.0.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".

The second milestone…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the third milestone release of the Spring Android project is now available!

Spring Android supports usage of the Spring Framework in a Android environment. The 1.0.0.M3 release focuses on extending the use of Spring Social in native Android applications. This includes:

• Support for Spring Social 1.0.0.M3 through the new Spring Android Auth module, which includes a SQLite datastore for persisting API connections. Spring Social is currently supported in Android version 2.3.1 (API Level 9) and higher.
• Updated RestTemplate (client) support, now at the level of Spring Framework 3.1.0.M1.

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.M3):
git clone git://github.com/SpringSource/spring-android-samples.git; cd samples/spring-android-showcase; more README

In addition to the reference guide, Roy Clarkson has authored two blog posts to help you get started developing Android applications:

• Spring Android and Maven (Part 1)
• Spring Android and Maven (Part 2)

If you're building native Android applications, we invite you to collaborate with us on the Spring Android project!

The Groovy language is an excellent platform for creating domain specific languages (DSLs). A good DSL can make programs more concise and expressive as well as make programmers more productive. However, until now these DSLs were not directly supported by Groovy-Eclipse in the editor. When DSLs are used heavily, standard IDE features like content assist, search, hovers, and navigation lose their value. For a while now, it has been possible to write an Eclipse plugin to extend Groovy-Eclipse, but this is a heavy-weight approach that requires specific knowledge of the Eclipse APIs. Now that…

Dear Spring Community,

We're pleased to announce the new release 2.6.1 of the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS).

The release brings you:

• vFabric tc Server 2.5 packaged and supported
• Bugfixes for tc Server instance creation

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.

It's May, already! Seems like just yesterday we were toasting the arrival of the new year...

As they say, time flies when you're having fun! This year's been a roller coaster - exciting news and events every day - too much to keep up with, certainly!

1. Jon Brisbin has written up an epic post introducing the CloudFoundry project and many of the technologies that you can use on it.

   This was just put up today, and is now one of my favorite blogs introducing CloudFoundry; it's so ambitious, just like CloudFoundry itself!

2. Another masterpiece of a sample is the blog that Costin Leau wrote, Getting Started with Redis and Spring Cloud Foundry. This post is well worth reading whether you're doing CloudFoundry, Spring Data, or both. A dynamic duo, indeed!

<li>European community members can learn more about Spring, Spring Data and Cloud Foundry at the S2G Forum Series: <a href="http://www.springsource.com/events/s2gforum-5-26-2011-amsterdam">Amsterdam…