News & Events

Where has the time gone? Honestly! It seems like we just started this merry little adventure into 2011. I was still recuperating from the explosion of great content and ideas that was SpringOne 2010. Heck, we had SpringOne 2010 videos on InfoQ well into this year! And yet time marches on, and here we are, staring down the barrel of SpringOne2GX 2011 in just a few weeks! If you haven't already registered, do! If you have registered, bring your thinking caps (or, helmets). This year's going to be insane. Even if I could tell you more, we've got a lot content to go over! So, with that...

1. Are you, like the throngs of people who descended on the SpringSource booth last week at JavaOne, curious about the CloudFoundry project? The CloudFoundry team has put together this video demonstrating how to use CloudFoundry from the SpringSource Tool Suite and from Ruby. Check it out for a whirlwind tour of CloudFoundry.
2. Apache Tomcat engineer Mark Thomas introduces the Servlet 3 support for "fragments" in Apache Tomcat 7. Cool stuff, and the example's on-point for the imminent Spring 3.1 release. Good stuff, Mark!
3. The Java Code Geeks introduce Spring Insight, the powerful agent that lives in the tc Server Developer Edition. For a great, in depth look at Spring Insight, check out this post.
4. The Spring Social project's taken on a life of its own! It seems like every week there's a new implementation that's being built on top of the powerful, foundational connection and autorization APIs that Spring Social provides. Google+, the new social network from Google, is an oft-demanded integration. Unfortunately, there was no API available until just recently. In what seems like minutes after the announcement, Bozhidar Bozhanov had rushed in to provide a Spring Social API for Google+. Nice job, Bozhidar! If you want to get started with Spring Social, be sure to check out Spring Social lead Craig Walls' webinar recording introducing Spring Social.
5. BSB has written a bit about how to use Spring Batch to handle staging of data in a batch job. It introduces the core SPIs, ItemReader, ItemWriter, and ItemProcessor, and then shows how to seed a batch job using a StagingItemProcessor. Good stuff! This is another example of how the strong reliance on flexible SPIs make Spring extensible to new use cases that weren't envisioned in the original design. Nice job, guys!
6. Sivaprasadreddy Katamreddy demonstrates how to go beyond the built-in Spring support for Quartz, the popular open source job scheduling engine, and leverage annotations to drive the registration and configuration of new Quartz jobs. This post is doubly useful: it makes the Spring and Quartz integration as smooth as silk, on par with the inbuilt support for scheduling with Spring's own @Scheduled annotation, and it shows how - with a little bit of coding, you can leverage Spring's fantastic component model and rich SPIs to extend the framework and build micro-frameworks.
7. Your humble editor was recently asked about good content to get started with Neo4J, the graph database, and Spring Data Graph, the Spring Data integration for Neo4J. I answered the question, but decided it might be helpful for others. Check out this little listing of useful links to learn Neo4J and Spring Data Graph.
8. Alex Soto builds a Yaml HttpMessageConverter. Yaml (short for "Yet another markup language") provides a human-readable and writable representation of data (like JSON, but even simpler). Yaml is a natural choice for REST services, because it's so easy to interact with. The HttpMessageConverter SPI, in Spring's web support, is used to drive how Spring marshals an object over an HTTP request (or response) and vice-vera, from an object into some type of payload that can be encoaded in an HTTP request (or response).
9. Ashish Sarin, author of the Spring Roo 1.1 Cookbook from PACKT, has written up an introduction to the AspectJ inter-type declaration (ITD) language. This is not required reading if you're using Spring Roo, but it is very cool to see what's possible, and having such an able introduction's very helpful!
10. Chad Lung provides a useful recipe for setting up Tomcat authentication using the DataSourceRealm on CentOS 6 and MySQL. There's nothing Spring-specific to this post, but it's a useful recipe if you're using Apache Tomcat!
11. Alex Soto is at it again! This time, he introduces REST, the architectual concept, and then backs it up with a concreate example using Spring MVC.
12. Roger Hughes introduces Spring's @Required annotation. His post explores a not only how to use the annotation, but when. It is a compelling read for one of Spring's most powerful gems, and best kept secrets. Nice job, Roger!
13. Roger Hughes introduces Spring's AOP support, particularly, the @AfterThrowing annotation, which lets you intercept a method invocation just after an exception's been thrown but before it's been handled. Fascinating read, and a nice reminder of the power that bubbles just beneath the surface of the framework.