The official Cloud Foundry blog has confirmed that Spring 3.1 is now available from the Maven repository along with Grails 2.0. The new release is billed as providing a "significant upgrade" to the Spring framework with environment profiles, caching abstraction, and Java 7 and Hibernate 4.0 support. Alongside the new Spring 3.1 offering, Grails 2.0 will now add an interactive mode, console enhancements, a reloading agent, and numerous testing and error-handling improvements.
The VMware-originated Cloud Foundry team has said that support for both frameworks in CloudFoundry.com and Micro Cloud Foundry will follow suit after this news. The new Spring 3.1 environment profiles features will include cloud profiles used by Cloud Foundry itself and lend themselves towards Java-based application configuration, declarative caching, and Servlet 3.0 support.
Cofounder of the Spring framework project Juergen Hoeller will reportedly detail the full functionality of this release's mechanics in a forthcoming webinar in January 2012. Hoeller will discuss how to use Spring for cloud computing, HTML 5 applications, and the future of enterprise Java application architecture.
According to the Cloud Foundry blog, the Grails plugin for Cloud Foundry makes it easy to put applications into the cloud: "The forthcoming Grails 2.0 provides an important evolution of the popular Groovy-based productivity framework. The new release will provide an interactive command line, new unit-testing capabilities covering in-memory GORM and full REST testing, an updated resource plug-in to improve web content modularity, database migration tools, and substantial GORM improvements."
Looking ahead, the Cloud Foundry team has said that it is working hard to create the best developer experience to these two "incredibly productive application frameworks" — and, concurrently, Hoeller himself has pointed out that Spring 3.1 adds dedicated conversation management facilities and many further improvements in Spring MVC, as well as explicit support for Servlet 3.0 and Tomcat 7 features. In his webinar session, he will focus on selected key themes of Spring 3.1 in the context of modern web applications.
