With so much of the focus on the new features in Spring 3.1, it is important to remember that the 3.0.x branch is still being updated. Sneaking in under the radar last week, we saw the release of Spring 3.0.6. This release addresses over 50 minor issues and includes about a dozen small improvements. Be sure to read the Change Log for all the details.

Download | Documentation | Javadoc API | Change Log | JIRA

Don't forget that Spring users can ask questions in the community forum and identify issues in JIRA as well.

Welcome to another edition of "This Week in Spring" Things are moving fast and furious as we near next week's VMworld 2011. I want to invite any attendees to visit your expert technologists at the VMWorld Spring booth. Let me know if you read this weekly roundup. Lots to talk about this week, so let's get to it!

<li>The preliminary session schedule has been published for <a href="http://www.springone2gx.com">SpringOne 2GX 2011</a>. This year's show is going to be another fantastic mix of deep technical content, cutting edge development and the absolute best place to learn about everything in the Spring universe. Be sure to <a href="http://springone2gx.com/conference/chicago/2011/10/register">register now</a>!</li>

<LI> <a href="http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.6.RELEASE/changelog.txt">Spring 3.0.6's was just released!</a>   		 
	 This release addresses over 50 minor issues and includes…

Today VMware team released Micro Cloud Foundry, a complete, local version of the popular, open source Platform as a Service that lets developers run a full featured cloud on their Mac or PC. Using Micro Cloud Foundry developers can build end-to-end cloud applications locally, without the hassles of configuring middleware while preserving the choice of where to deploy and the ability to scale their applications without changing a line of code.

Micro Cloud Foundry supports Spring and Java, of course, but also provides runtime environments for Scala, Node.js, and Ruby so that you can release your inner polyglot programmer! Micro Cloud Foundry also provides many services like MongoDB, MySQL, and Redis with come ready to use immediately without having to do extensive installation and configuration. With built-in dynamic DNS support, developers can run their Micro Cloud Foundry wherever they happen to be working – whether at home, office or coffee shop – without any reconfiguration required. After creating and testing your application on Micro Cloud Foundry, you can easily deploy your…

Back in April, VMware introduced Cloud Foundry to the world and with it came super-simple application deployment for Grails developers. Fast forward several months and now another piece of the jigsaw is in place: Micro Cloud Foundry. You can now have your own Cloud Foundry instance for testing or any other use case. And of course, it's incredibly easy to use from Grails.

So what is Micro Cloud Foundry? The following screencast gives you a brief overview of the product and then takes you through the process of downloading, installing and configuring it. At the end, you get to see how you can…

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce a new milestone release 2.7.0.M4 of the Cloud Foundry Integration for the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). This milestone release includes support for the just released Micro Cloud Foundry and allows you to register users directly from within your IDE. In addition to that the milestone includes a number of fixes and improvements to existing features.

Installation instructions and a quick guide for the tooling is available from the SpringSource Team Blog: Using Cloud Foundry from STS.

Today the VMware team released Micro Cloud Foundry, a complete, local version of the popular, open source Platform as a Service that lets developers run a full featured cloud on their Mac or PC. Using Micro Cloud Foundry developers can build end-to-end cloud applications locally, without the hassles of configuring middleware while preserving the choice of where to deploy and the ability to scale their applications without changing a line of code.

Micro Cloud Foundry is available as a free downloadable virtual machine image and is compatible with VMware Fusion for Mac OS X and VMware Workstation and VMware Player (available as a free download) for Linux and Windows computers. It provides easy installation, setup, and virtual machine management and all you need is a Cloud Foundry account to get started.

Josh Long has created a getting started guide for Spring developers and produced a simple video tutorial.

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.

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the second release (1.1.0.RELEASE) of the Spring Data Graph project with Neo4j support is now available!

After the first public release of Spring Data Graph in April 2011 we mainly focused on user feedback.

With the improved documentation around the tooling and an upgraded AspectJ version we addressed many of the AspectJ issues that where reported by users. With the latest STS and Eclipse and hopefully with Idea11 it is possible to develop Spring Data Graph applications without the red wiggles. To further ease the development we also provided sample build scripts for ant/ivy and a plugin for gradle.

Of course we kept pace with development of Neo4j, currently using the latest stable release of Neo4j (1.4.1).

During the last months of Neo4j development the improved querying (Cypher, Gremlin) support was one of the important aspects. So we strove to support it on all levels. Now, it is possible to execute Cypher queries from Spring Data Graph Repositories, from the Neo4j-Template but also as part of dynamic field annotations and via the introduced entity methods. The same goes for Gremlin scripts. What's possible with this new expressive power? Let's take a look.

For example, in a repository:

	public interface PersonRepository extends GraphRepository, NamedIndexRepository {
	
	    @Query("start team=(%team) match (team)-[:persons]->(member) return member")
	    Iterable findAllTeamMembers(@Param("team") Group team);
	
	    @Query(value = "g.v(team).out('persons')", type = QueryType.Gremlin)
	    Iterable findAllTeamMembersGremlin(@Param("team") Group team);
	}

The Neo4j Template API got a complete overhaul which resulted in much fewer, more focused methods. The advanced query result handling capabilities (type conversion, mapping, single results, handler, etc.) are now implemented using a more fluent API. This new API is available for all types of queries, whether index lookups, graph traversals, Cypher queries or Gremlin scripts.

	template.query("start n=(0) match n-->m return m", null).to(Node.class);
template.execute("g.v(0).out", null).to(Node.class);

template.lookup("relationship", "name", "rel1").to(String.class, new PropertyContainerNameConverter()).single();

template.traverse(referenceNode, traversalDescription).handle(new Handler<Path>() {
            public void handle(Path value) {
                final String name = (String) value.endNode().getProperty("name", "");
                resultSet.add(name…

One of the many nice features of Grails is the way it will automatically create your database schema for you from your domain model. Admittedly it's a feature of Hibernate that Grails uses, but still, it helps you get started very quickly with database-driven web applications without having to worry about the database schema.

Last week the availability of RabbitMQ as a service on Cloud Foundry was announced. Any application running on Cloud Foundry may now send and receive messages via a RabbitMQ broker that can be provisioned as a service with a single command (e.g. 'vmc create-service rabbitmq'). Instances of the messaging service may be shared between applications, and since RabbitMQ is a protocol-based broker, those applications may even be written in different languages. So, this is an exciting announcement for those interested in modular, polyglot, event-driven applications running in the cloud. I will be…