Spring Framework 6.1 M2 introduces the RestClient, a new synchronous HTTP client. As the name suggests, RestClient offers the fluent API of WebClient with the infrastructure of RestTemplate.

Fourteen years ago, when RestTemplate was introduced in Spring Framework 3.0, we quickly discovered that exposing every capability of HTTP in a template-like class resulted in too many overloaded methods. In Spring Framework 5, we therefore used a fluent API for the reactive WebClient. With RestClient we are introducing a HTTP client that offers an API similar to WebClient, and that uses the message converters, request factories, interceptors, and other underlying components of RestTemplate…

It has been a while since Spring Framework 5.3 was released. One of the features in that release was a major overhaul of our Reactive Multipart support. In this blog post, we share some of the knowledge learned while working on this feature. Specifically, we focus on finding a token within a stream of byte buffers.

Multipart Form Data

Whenever you upload a file, your browser sends it — and other fields in the form — to the server as a multipart/form-data message. The exact format of these messages is described in RFC 7578. If you submit a simple form with a single text field called foo and a file selector called file, the multipart/form-data…

If you regularly listen to A Bootiful Podcast, you might have heard about the improvements we made to Spring Framework’s cron support. Cron expressions are mostly used in Spring applications through the @Scheduled annotation. In Spring 5.3, we introduced the CronExpression class, which represents — you guessed it — a cron expression.

CronExpression replaces CronSequenceGenerator, which is based on java.util.Calendar and which has several known issues that none of the Spring team members felt comfortable solving. Introducing a new type allowed us to use the superior java.time APIs, solve the…

As mentioned yesterday in Juergen's blog post, the second milestone of Spring Framework 5.0 introduced a new functional web framework. In this post, I will give more information about the framework.

Keep in mind the functional web framework is built on the same reactive foundation that we provided in M1 and on which we also support annotation-based (i.e. @Controller, @RequestMapping) request handling, see the M1 blog post for more on that.

Example

We start with some excerpts from our sample application. Below is a reactive repository that exposes Person objects. It is quite similar to a traditional, non-reactive repository, except that it returns Flux<Person> where you would return a List<Person> traditionally, and Mono<Person> where you would return a Person. Mono<Void> is used as a completion signal: to indicate when the save has been completed. For more information on these Reactor types, refer to Dave's blog post…

I'm pleased to announce that Spring Web Services 2.2.0.RELEASE has been released! This is the first release in the 2.2 release cycle. The main new feature in 2.2 is the introduction of code configuration support for Spring-WS. This means that you can now configure Spring-WS with a simple @EnableWs annotation. For instance:

@Configuration
@EnableWs
@ComponentScan(basePackageClasses = { MyConfiguration.class })
public class MyWsConfiguration {

  // @Beans go here
}

For more information about this topic, refer to the javadoc of @EnableWs. You can also read more about this new feature in the updated reference documentation. To view a complete list of changes see the changelog…

Last October, at SpringOne2GX, I introduced the Spring Scala project to the world. Since then, I've also presented this project at Devoxx. In this blog post, I would like to give further details about this project and how you can use it in your Scala projects.

Why Spring Scala?

The goal of the Spring Scala project is simply to make it easier to use the Spring framework in Scala. We believe that there are many Spring users out there who want to try Scala out, but do not want to leave their experience with Spring behind. This project is meant for those people.

Obviously, you can use the (Java) Spring Framework in Scala today, without Spring Scala. But doing so will be awkward in certain places. Just like any programming language, Scala has its own, different way of doing things, and using a pure Java framework like Spring in Scala will just feel "too Java-esque". Spring Scala tries to fix…

After being in the works for almost a year, I'm happy to announce that Spring Web Services 2.0 has been released! In this post, I'd like to go over some of the major new features.

Java 5+ and Spring 3.0 Required

As you are probably aware, we moved the Object XML Mapping (OXM) module from the Spring-WS project into Spring 3.0. As such, it was a bit problematic to use Spring-WS 1.5 (with its own OXM module) with Spring 3.0, due to conflicting classes in the org.springframework.oxm package.

As of version 2.0, we no longer ship the OXM module as part of Spring-WS, but depend on Spring's OXM instead. As a result, Spring Web Services 2.0 requires Spring 3.0 to work. Normally, we tend to be a bit more lenient with regard to version requirements, not necessarily requiring the latest Spring version, but this was the…

In an earlier post, I blogged about the REST capabilities we added to Spring @MVC version 3.0. Later, Alef wrote about using the introduced functionality to add an Atom view to the Pet Clinic application. In this post, I would like to introduce the client-side capabilities we added in Milestone 2.

RestTemplate

The RestTemplate is the central Spring class for client-side HTTP access. Conceptually, it is very similar to the JdbcTemplate, JmsTemplate, and the various other templates found in the Spring Framework and other portfolio projects. This means, for instance, that the RestTemplate is thread-safe once constructed, and that you can use callbacks to customize its operations.

RestTemplate Methods

The main entry points of the template are named after the six main HTTP methods:

HTTP	RestTemplate
DELETE	delete(String, String...)
GET	getForObject(String, Class, String...)
HEAD	headForHeaders(String, String...)
OPTIONS	optionsForAllow(String, String...)
POST	postForLocation(String, Object, String...)
PUT	put(String, Object, String...)

The names of these methods clearly indicate which HTTP method they invoke, while the second part of the name indicates what is returned. For instance, getForObject() will perform a GET, convert the HTTP response into an object type of your choice, and returns that object. postForLocation will do a POST, converting the given object into a HTTP request, and returns the response HTTP Location header where the newly created object can be…

In the last couple of years, REST has emerged as a compelling alternative to SOAP/WSDL/WS-*-based distributed architectures. So when we started to plan our work on the next major release of Spring - version 3.0, it was quite clear to us that we had to focus on making the development of 'RESTful' Web services and applications easier. Now, what is and isn't 'RESTful' could be the topic of a whole new post all together; in this post I'll take a more practical approach, and focus on the features that we added to the @Controller model of Spring MVC.

A Bit of Background

Ok, I lied: there is some background first. If you really want to learn about the new features, feel free to skip to the next section.

For me, work on REST started about two years ago, shortly after reading the highly recommended book RESTful Web Services from O'Reilly, by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby. Initially, I was thinking about adding REST support to Spring Web Services, but after working a couple of weeks on a prototype, it became clear to me that this wasn't a very good fit. In particular, I found out that I had to copy most of the logic from the Spring-MVC DispatcherServlet…

Dear Spring community,

I'm pleased to announce that Spring Web Services 1.5.1 has been released!

Downloads | Site | Changelog | Announcement

This is the first bug fix and enhancement release in the Spring-WS 1.5 series. It fixes all bugs reported since 1.5.0 and introduces various enhancements throughout the framework:

• Introduced a Spring JMS MessageConverter that uses OXM marshallers
• Introduced a Spring MVC View that uses OXM marshallers
• Fixed WS-Security signatures when using WSS4J in combination with SAAJ messages
• Support for timeouts on HTTP transports
• Support for Castor 1.2, see note below
• Airline sample now uses Spring Security

and more. Please see the changelog for details.

Please note that - due to a backwards compatibility issue - the CastorMarshaller now requires Castor 1.2 or higher.

Cheers,

Arjen Poutsma
Spring Web Services Lead