What a week! If you're an enterprise Java developer, then you've no doubt heard the news - Spring 3.1 RC1 has just been released! Read on for more details and be sure to sound off on the forums if you have questions or feedback!

And, of course, if you're at SpringOne2GX 2011 next week, you can look forward to hearing a lot more on Spring 3.1 as well as the latest and greatest from all the Spring technologies. We look forward to seeing you all there!

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1. Spring 3.1.0.RC1 was released last week! And so begins the march to Spring 3.1 GA. Chris Beams kicked things off with this announcement. Then, Juergen Hoeller, Spring project lead, followed up with this blog post detailing the new features. The first release candidate of Spring 3.1 is now available from the Spring milestone repository or for direct download via community download page. This release includes new features such as:

   Support for Hibernate 4.0 (up to date with 4.0 CR4), 
   Complete <CODE>TestContext</CODE> framework support for <CODE>@Configuration</CODE> classes,
   Flash scope for Spring MVC, 
   Support for Quartz 2.0,  
   77 bug fixes, 16 new features, and 66 improvements. Wow! To learn more about what's new in Spring 3.1, be sure to <a href="http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.1.0.RC1/spring-framework-reference/html/new-in-3.1.html">check out this document.</a>
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     Martin Lippert today announced the <a  href="http://www.springsource.org/node/3287">release of SpringSource…

Dear Spring Community,

I am pleased to announce the first release candidate of the Spring Data Redis 1.0 project is now available!

Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog

This release features several fixes and improvements such as:

• Upgrade to Spring 3.1 RC1
• Improved JDK 5 compatibility
• Improved Spring 3.1 cache abstraction on top of Redis

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

Dear Spring Community, We are pleased to announce that the release candidate (1.0.0.RC1) of the Spring Data JDBC Extensions 1.0 project with Oracle Database support is now available!

The new Spring Data JDBC Extensions project was created to provide additional support for vendor specific JDBC extensions as well as new approaches to working with JDBC like QueryDSL. The bulk of the support is made up of code ported from the SpringSource project "Advanced Pack for Oracle Database" that was available for support subscription customers. We are now making this code available to all Spring users and any new developments will be made in the Spring Data JDBC Extensions project.

Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog

To learn more about the project, visit the Spring Data JDBC Extensions Homepage.

The improvements in Spring Data JDBC Extensions 1.0.0.RC1 include:

• Added documentation chapter for QueryDSL SQL module
• Added OSGi manifests
• Fixed slf4j/log4j and other dependencies

I'd like to thank Andrei Stefan for the JPetStore re-write using the QueryDSL support and SQLFire. It provides a good example for using the QueryDslJdbcTemplate in a project - see https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-sqlfire-samples.

Looking forward to your feedback on the forum or in the issue tracker.

Dear Spring Community,

We're pleased to announce the new release 2.8.0 of the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). Some highlights from this release:

• ships on top of Eclipse Indigo SR1
• includes full IDE support for Java 7 (coming with the Eclipse 3.7.1 update)
• support for Spring 3.1 bean profiles, including validation and navigation
• support for Spring 3.1 c-namespace including quick-fixes, validation and content-assist
• improved constructor-arg validation and quick-fixes
• updated Eclipse Maven integration (m2e 1.0.100), including migration assistance
• support for Groovy 1.8.2
• support for Grails 2.0.0.M2

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.

If you wanna upgrade an existing STS installation, please also take a look at this blog post on how to upgrade the m2e support properly.

UPDATE, Nov 23: We have released STS 2.8.1, that fixes many of the install/uninstall of m2eclipse issues that people were having. Read the release announcement. Now, it is possible to upgrade/downgrade m2eclipse easily. STS 2.8.1 fully supports both versions of m2eclipse.

Today, we released version 2.8.0 of the SpringSource Tool Suite. Along with an update to Eclipse Indigo SR1 (which brings you full IDE support for Java7), we also updated the Maven integration from the old and unmaintained m2eclipse versions 0.12.x to the latest version m2e 1.0 – which is now shipping as part of the…

Services offered in Cloud Foundry make writing efficient and effective applications possible. Developers can now choose just the right kind of services without worrying about operating those services. For example, a portion of an application can choose Postgres for the parts where transactional access is crucial, MongoDB where interacting with data as a collection of documents makes sense, Redis where key-value is the right abstraction, and RabbitMQ where messaging helps create effective architecture. In this four-part blog series, we will explore how Spring applications can use Cloud Foundry…

It is my pleasure to announce that the first Spring Framework 3.1 release candidate has - finally - been released this week! We have been working on this release for several months, completing our milestone work and recently adding support for Java SE 7 and for Hibernate 4.0 to the feature list.

Spring Framework 3.1 RC1 completes the 3.1 feature set:

• The environment abstraction and the environment profile mechanism for bean definitions.

• Comprehensive Java-based application configuration based on @Enable* annotations on @Configuration classes.

• An overhaul of the TestContext framework with first-class support for @Configuration classes and for environment profiles.

• Our new "c:" namespace for conveniently specifying constructor arguments by name in a concise inline style.

• The cache abstraction with our declarative caching solution (@Cacheable etc) on top.

• The Servlet 3.0 based WebApplicationInitializer mechanism for bootstrapping a Spring web application without web.xml!

  …

Spring Social is an extension of the Spring Framework that enables applications to connect with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as Facebook and Twitter and interact with those services on behalf of their users. This presentations by Craig Walls introduces Spring Social essentials such as connecting to service providers and using Spring Social's API bindings. Craig also describes how to add provider-based sign in and how to extend Spring Social's service provider support.

Be sure to thumbs up the presentation if you find it useful and subscribe to the SpringSourceDev channel to receive updates about all the latest presentation recordings and screencasts.

Apache Maven is a very popular choice in the Java community for building and deploying applications.  The Cloud Foundry team has released the Cloud Foundry Maven Plugin to integrate with applications’ development lifecycle, including deployment to the cloud.  The same Maven plugin can be used to manage application pushes and updates to any Cloud Foundry instance.

One of Cloud Foundry’s main promises is to make your life as a developer a whole lot easier without limiting available choices. Cloud Foundry not only supports a plethora of languages (Java, Groovy, Scala, Ruby etc.) and frameworks (Spring, Grails, Rails, Sinatra, Lift etc.) but it also allows you to deploy your applications to different environments. This includes public clouds, such as Cloudfoundry.com and AppFog.com, partner-provided cloud offerings, single VM Micro Cloud Foundry…