As new applications take advantage of the scalability benefits of message brokers like RabbitMQ and cloud-scale datastores like Riak, it's inevitable that the two should become fast friends (the kind who actually talk to each other in person rather than the kind whose only contact is through Facebook).

So many of the applications we find ourselves writing these days have these two functions in the same application. Very often we want to update data as the result of a message or send a message as the result of updated data. Two new utilities facilitating RabbitMQ and Riak integration allow you…

Welcome back to This Week in Spring. The enthusiasm for last week's Cloud Foundry announcement was outstanding and appears to be getting stronger! People all over the world have flooded the SpringSource and CloudFoundry forums, downloads pages and source repositories. What unprecedented activity!

Many of the different, powerful technologies coming out of SpringSource recently have been leading up to the Cloud Foundry release so I invite you to review some of the exciting stuff that's come out in the last few months that have become even more interesting in terms of the cloud and Cloud Foundry: Spring Gemfire, Spring AMQP, Spring 3.1 profiles, Spring 3.1 caching abstraction, Spring Data, Spring Integration support for NoSQL, and Spring Hadoop, vFabric Hyperic, vFabric RabbitMQ, and vFabric GemFire. Of course, for all of these technologies - the first, and best, tooling and development experience continues to be SpringSource Tool Suite and Spring Roo.

Ok, onward to this week's review. So much exciting stuff, so little time!

1. Christian Dupuis has just written up a detailed blog on using STS to deploy to Cloud Foundry.

 <li><A href="http://www.springsource.org/node/3103">Spring Roo 1.1.3</a>, featuring 
 Cloud Foundry support, shell enhancements, and improved support for composite primary keys - among other things - has been released. 
</li>

	 <li> DZone has published a <a href="http://refcardz.dzone.com/refcardz/spring-roo-open-source-rapid?oid=hom38521">Spring Roo RefCard</a> by the Spring Roo team's <a href="http://www.twitter.com/schmidtstefan">Stefan Schmidt.</a> This RefCard's a fantastic way to get going quickly with Spring Roo. Spring Roo, it could be argued, is ideally suited to the RefCard…

This announcement post is a guest contribution by the developers of the Neo4j team that worked closely with SpringSource's Spring Data team to provide the Spring Data Graph integration library.

For a friendly introduction to Spring Data Graph we’re hosting a free webinar with VMware presented by Neo Technology’s CEO Emil Eifrem on April 20 at two convenient times for the Americas and Europe. [Update: The webinar video is now available on youtube in the SpringSourceDev channel.]

Now that Spring is in the air, the Neo4j and Spring Data teams are happy that almost a year’s worth of work has produced our 1.0 version of the Spring Data Graph library. The Spring Data project aims to bring the convenient programming model of the Spring Framework to NOSQL databases. Spring Data Graph supports graph databases…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the first release (1.0.0.RELEASE) of the Spring Data Graph 1.0 project with Neo4j support is now available! This marks the first in a series of releases of the Spring Data subprojects over the next few months.

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.

A guest blog post detailing the release has been published on the SpringSource Blogs.

The Graph Neo4j module provides integration with the Neo4j graph database. Back in 2010, Rod Johnson and Emil Eifrem started brainstorming about Spring and Neo4j integration including transparent persistence and cross-store support. After an initial prototype it has been further developed in close cooperation between the VMware…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring.NET REST Client 1.0.0 is now available.

Download | Support | Documentation | Community

Spring.NET REST Client is a lightweight library (~60k-80k, depending on your target platform) that has no direct dependency on the Spring.NET Framework. It can be used either by itself in isolation or in combination with the remainder of the Spring.NET Framework to suit different usage scenarios.

The 1.0.0 release of Spring.NET REST Client contains:

• A RestTemplate class for client-side access to RESTful services
• A set of HTTP message converters used to marshal objects into the HTTP request body and to unmarshal any response back into an object.

Spring.NET REST Client supports all of the following .NET Runtime environments

• .NET 2.0
• .NET Client Profile 3.5 and 4.0
• Silverlight 3.0 and 4.0
• Windows Phone 7.0

This project is hosted at GitHub.

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

By now you probably heard about Cloud Foundry, the open PaaS from VMware that was announced yesterday; if not make sure to check out the recording of the webcast. Eventually you have already read earlier blog posts introducing the Spring support for Cloud Foundry, the add-on for Spring Roo and the Grails plug-in.

With this post I’d like to introduce the Eclipse-based support for Cloud Foundry that lets you manage your cloud deployments, including configuration of Services and service bindings, application scaling, access to file resources and much more.

Installing the Cloud Foundry for Eclipse and STS

There are three options to install the Cloud Foundry plugin into SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) and plain Eclipse. I will go through those options step-by-step in order to help you get started quickly.

Installing through the STS Extension Install

Probably the easiest way to get started with the Cloud Foundry plugin is by installing it into a pre-installed copy of STS. You should have at least version 2.5.1.RELEASE installed; 2.6.1.SR1 is better. STS for various supported operating systems can be found on the download page.

Within STS select “Help > Dashboard…

Today, we have exciting news for developers: the launch of Cloud Foundry: an open source “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) from VMware allowing easy deployment of applications written using Spring, Rails and other modern frameworks. Cloud Foundry breaks new ground in PaaS through supporting a choice of programming models; a choice of services from VMware and third parties; a choice of clouds for deployment; and being delivered in open source.

Since the creation of Spring, we’ve remained faithful to a few core values: notably, Productivity and Portability. Today, these proven values extend beyond Spring and Java into VMware’s broader cloud computing strategy. Spring makes developers more productive by reducing time spent away from business logic; Cloud Foundry eliminates time spent installing and configuring infrastructure such as application servers and JVMs. Spring facilitates portability between deployment destinations; Cloud Foundry is both a key deployment destination itself and a layer that…

By now, many of you have probably seen the Cloud Foundry webinar and Rod's blog from earlier today. I'd like to provide a quick follow-up that features a "hello-spring" sample application deployed in the cloud. Thanks to Cloud Foundry, there's practically no learning curve at all.

Before we get started, let's consider three goals that have driven Spring from day one:

1. focus on simplicity and productivity to make developers lives easier
2. support innovative technologies in a consistent way
3. ensure portability of applications across deployment environments

Then, consider those same three goals in relation to Cloud Foundry:

1. Simplicity and Productivity: Deploying a Spring application to the cloud is as simple as dragging and dropping within SpringSource Tool Suite, and even when building an application to run in the cloud, developers can take advantage of the productivity gains enabled by Roo and Grails exactly as they normally would.
2. Consistent Innovation: Projects like Spring Social and Spring Data embrace innovative technologies such as Twitter and non-relational data stores that are increasingly popular for cloud-based applications, and they do so in ways that are consistent with the existing Spring platform. Cloud Foundry provides services to support such applications. RabbitMQ will be available as a cloud service soon, so the same applies to applications that rely on RabbitMQ for messaging via Spring AMQP and Spring Integration.
3. Portability: The cloud is first and foremost a new deployment environment, and yet it's easy to create an application that can run in and out of the cloud without even swapping configuration files.

With those goals in mind, we've designed a sample application that provides an introduction to Cloud Foundry for Spring developers. This is the first of many…

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…