Dear Spring Community

I'm pleased to announce that we just released SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) 2.5.2.RELEASE.

Some highlights from the new release:

• Support for Spring Roo 1.1.1.RELEASE
• Easy creation of new tc Server instances
• Improved graphical Spring Web Flow editor
• Agent-based reloading (experimental)
• A large number of improvements to the Spring and Groovy/Grails tooling
• Integration of Spring User Agent Analysis (UAA)

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. Feel free to stop by the community support forum if you have any question or issue.

All applications stem from a domain model. The term "domain model" describes the nouns, or data, in a system that is important to the problem you're trying to solve. The service tier - where business logic lives - manipulates the application data and must ultimately persist it (typically, in a database). The explanation is simple, but in practice building a good service tier can be a daunting task for any developer. This post will introduce developers to the options available in the Spring framework for building a better service tier. It is assumed that the reader has some experience with the…

Spring MVC, a part of the core Spring Framework, is a mature and capable action-response style web framework, with a wide range of capabilities and options aimed at handling a variety of UI-focused and non-UI-focused web tier use cases. All this can potentially be overwhelming to the Spring MVC neophyte. I think it's useful for this audience to show just how little work there is to get a bare Spring MVC application up and running (i.e. consider my example something akin to the world's simplest Spring MVC application), and that's what I'll spend the rest of this article demonstrating.

I'm assuming you are familiar with Java, Spring (basic dependency injection concepts), and the basic Servlet programming model, but do not know Spring MVC. After reading this blog entry, readers may continue learning about Spring MVC by looking at Keith Donald's Spring MVC 3 Showcase…

Dear Spring community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring Web Services 2.0 Release Candidate 2 has been released!

This is the second release candidate in the 2.0 release cycle. The most important new feature in this release is the update of the Spring-WS XML namespace, which now contains <sws:annotation-driven/> and <sws:interceptors/> elements (similar to the Spring-MVC namespace), and <sws:static-wsdl/> and <sws:dynamic-wsdl/> for exporting your WSDLs. All of these features are described in the updated reference documentation.

We consider this release (RC2) complete. If no major new issues are found, we will release 2.0.0-RELEASE in the first half of January 2011.

While we did make some changes, Spring-WS 2.0 should be a drop-in replacement for 1.5 with just one exception. Please read the forum post for the details.

Download | Documentation | ChangeLog | Community Forum

We're pleased to an announce the second milestone release of Spring Security 3.1

Please see the changelog for a full list of updates since the M1 release.

The release is available from the Spring Community Downloads area and also from the SpringSource maven repository.

Download | Changelog | Reference Manual | FAQ

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce the first release candidate of the Spring GemFire 1.0 project is now available for both Java and .NET! The Spring GemFire project aims to make it easier to build Spring-powered highly scalable applications using GemFire as distributed data management platform.

The RC updates include:

• Upgrades to the latest Spring, Spring.NET and Gemfire releases
• Documentation improvements

To learn more about the project, visit the Spring GemFire homepage.

Download it now: Spring GemFire for Java | Spring GemFire for .NET

We look forward to your feedback!

Git is great for social coding and community contributions to open source projects: contributors can try out the code easily, and there can be hordes of people all forking and experimenting with it but without endangering existing users. This article presents some examples with the Git command line that might help build your confidence with this process: how to fetch, pull and merge, and how to back out of mistakes. If you are interested in the social coding process itself, and how to contribute to Spring projects, check out another blog on this site by Keith Donald.

Grails has been on Github for a while and had a great experience with community contributions, so some other projects from SpringSource are starting to migrate over there as well. Some of the migrating projects are new (e.g. Spring AMQP) and some are already established and have migrated from SVN (e.g. Spring Batch). There are also some Spring projects on a SpringSource hosted Gitorious instance, for example Spring Integration…

In the last year, new Spring projects have launched in a number of areas, including social, mobile, data, and integration. I've been doing this for nearly 7 years, and honestly it has never been as exciting for me as it is today. I feel this way because our community understands the importance of raising the bar by building on the foundations you've laid before. That's why we're able to move so quickly, and that's a testament to the quality of the core development team led by Juergen Hoeller.

One thing I'm very excited about is the increasing number of community contributions we're seeing. These have traditionally come in as patches via JIRA, but modern social coding platforms such as Github and Gitorious have opened new opportunities. In this blog entry, I'd like to present a new contribution…

We recently announced the M1 release of Spring Android, and with that release some questions have arisen around how to build an Android application utilizing the Spring Android Rest Template and Spring Android Commons Logging libraries. Google provides several methods for compiling an Android application, including SDK command line tools, and the ADT (Android Development Tools) Plugin for Eclipse. Unfortunately, neither of these methods includes integrated dependency management support.

Overview

As Java developers we have come to appreciate tools such as Maven and Gradle for managing external dependencies. While traditional Java applications run in a JVM, Android applications run on the Dalvik virtual machine.  The Dalvik VM executes files in the Dalvik Executable (.dex) format.  It runs classes compiled by a Java language compiler that have been transformed into the .dex format.  A build tool will need to support this process if it is going to be able to compile a compatible Android application with dependencies.

There are basically two options for including external libraries in your Android application. The first is to manually copy the jars into the libs directory within your project and update the classpath within Eclipse. This is the simplest solution, and the one most supported by the ADT plugin. The disadvantage is that you have to manage the dependencies manually. Alternatively, a third party plugin such as the Maven Android Plugin can be utilized to automatically include the dependencies from a Maven repository.

In this post I will walk through the process of using the Android command line tools, Maven, the Maven Android Plugin, and Android Maven artifacts to compile a sample application that utilizes the Spring Android libraries, and deploy it to the Android emulator. After you have configured Maven, it is easy to create a build, deploy it to the emulator, run tests, and package the app for deployment to the Android Market. Before running the sample code, we will first highlight the configuration settings necessary in the pom.xml. The components used in this example are listed below.

• SpringSource Tool Suite 2.5.2 (Eclipse 3.6.1)
• Android SDK Revision 9
• Maven Android Plugin 2.8.4

Maven Configuration

This section covers the parts of a pom.xml that are required for developing with Spring Android and the Maven Android Plugin.

Maven Android Plugin

In order to use Maven to build an Android application, you will need to configure the Maven Android Plugin within your pom.xml file. Android applications are deployed to the device as an apk file, not a jar. You must specify this in the the packaging configuration.

<packaging>apk</packaging>

To configure the Maven Android and Maven Compiler Plugins in the build task, set the sdk platform to the desired level. In this example it is set to 9, which corresponds to Android version 2.3.1. The emulator avd value is the name of the AVD (Android Virtual Device) you defined in the AVD Manager. In this case, an AVD with the name "9", but the AVD can be named whatever you like, as long as it matches the name you specified when creating the AVD. This is a basic configuration for the plugin that is needed to build and run an Android application…