Another great week - lots of new (and novel!) types of content and indeed, new sources of new content, too! Enjoy!

1. SpringSource unveiled the new SpringSource YouTube channel. This channel features exciting technical content on the SpringSource technologies, and should be your first destination for new content and for content that you might've missed the first time around. Check it out today! Personally, I find that this channel is fantastic on a big screen TV that supports a browser or YouTube (Google TV/Apple TV/slingbox/etc.) or on a peripheral screen - like a second laptop or second monitor. You can also listen to it on a portable device like an iPhone in the car, on the commute.
2. ...Speaking of the YouTube channel, the content and slides of last week's webinar - Getting Started with Spring and STS - is available for those that missed it. Juergen Hoeller, lead of the Spring framework, introduced the exciting next generation (3.1) of the Spring framework a few weeks ago in a live webinar, which is also available on the SpringSource YouTube channel!
3. Martin Lippert has announced the latest release of the SpringSource Tool Suite, version 2.6.0. The new release is packed with new features, and tracks the latest versions of various projects (Spring Roo 1.1..2, Eclipse Helios SR2, Groovy 1.7.8, Grails 1.3.7). It included updated support and performance for both Spring Roo and Groovy on Grails, a graphical editor for Spring Web Flow, and new support for content assist, quick fixes and refactorings for Spring annotations (@Autowired, @Qualifier, @RequestMapping, etc.).

4. Ramnivas Laddad pointed This Week in Spring to this very innovative Chrome browser plugin. To use it, type "spring" in the omnibox bar (the search/address bar) followed by a space, and then the nane of the class that you are searching for. It'll automatically bring up candidate results linked to the documentation! Fantastic, and handy! (NB: we tested this with the just-released Chrome 10, though it no doubt works with at least Chrome 9.)

5. InfoQ has the video of Mark Pollack's and Chris Richardson's amazing introduction to Spring Data from the SpringOne2GX event last year in Chicago. Spring Data is a great way to take advantage of these new, powerful datastore options (sometimes called "NoSQL" stores) in a way that's familiar, and idiomatic for Spring users. Check it out!
6. The latest release of the Spring Data project featuring support for Neo4j has been released. The new version includes many new features and tracks the latest version of Neo4j, itself. Neo4j is one of the many new specialized datastores available to developers today. Neo4j models data as relationships and nodes. It's optimized for fast node traversal, as in a Facebook friend-graph, for example.
   Additionally, SpringSource is producing a webinar on Spring Data (and specifically, the Spring Data Graph subprojct encompassing the Neo4j support) on April 20th. The presentation will be presented for both North America and for Europe. Register now!
7. The Spring framework helps you build the best applications. Spring Social builds on that promise and lets you integrate your application with your users. The JTeam group is at it again, this time with an interesting updated look at Spring Social complete with source code and a sample application. Check it out!
8. Spring MVC provides support for many different types of views, including RESTful payloads, Velocity templates, JSPs, and Tiles-based views. This blog post explains how to integrate Spring MVC with Tiles
9. Ken Rimple from Chariot Solutions has recorded a screencast on the newest member of the SpringSource family, Wavemaker.
10. More people are using the Spring framework now than ever before, and a consequence of that that growth is newer, specialized support for Spring in various tools. One UML toolmaker - Architexa - talks about their enhanced support for the Spring framework in their Eclipse-based product. Check out this blog for more.
11. Ashish Jain provides an interesting perspective on Spring 3.1's new caching support.

    Ashish's chosen to simplify his software stack (by removing Hibernate, and instead using straight JDBC through the Spring framework's JdbcTemplate, a great choice!), but was worried about having to give up Hibernate's declarative, 2nd level caching. With the cache support in Spring 3.1, he can have his cake and eat it too, regardless of the underlying data access technology!

12. Stuck on JBoss AS? Still need to be productive, and need better security support in your application? This blog walks through setting up Spring Security 3 on JBoss. Check it out.