As technologists we often never question how technology is affecting us and our world. This interview with Eric Brende presents an a different view on progress, innovation and technology. By Christopher Goldsbury

SpringOne 2GX 2011 was filled with great cloud content. In this presentation we get to learn how to use services with Spring on Cloud Foundry. This presentation is given by Spring and Cloud Foundry experts, Ramnivas Laddad, Jennifer Hickey and Scott Andrews. Together they cover all the details you need to understand about connecting your application to cloud services including auto-reconfiguration, cloud namespace, profile support, Java configuration and external service support. This is a great explanation about why Cloud Foundry is the best cloud platform for running you Spring applications. Many thanks to InfoQ for coming to Chicago to record so many of the fantastic SpringOne 2GX presentations.

TheServerSide has been digging into the new Java 7 features, and trying to provide some thorough and informative tutorials on how the various language enhancements introduced in Java 7 work. In this tutorial we expand on our initial look at the new try-with-resources syntax.

Yet another session from SpringOne 2GX 2011. This one gives instructions for how to get the most out of Spring and Google App Engine. Spring portability has given developers freedom of choice for applications servers and that now translates to a lot of freedom in choice of cloud platforms. This presentation is given by Chris Ramsdale, the Product Manager for Google App Engine and he covers a brief introduction to App Engine, how to use Spring, access to relation data in the cloud and gives tips for performance tweaks. This is a great introduction to using Spring on one of the many cloud platforms that support lightweight enterprise Java workloads. Many thanks to InfoQ for coming to Chicago to record so many of the fantastic SpringOne 2GX presentations.

The second phase of SolrCloud has been in full swing for a couple of months now and it looks like we are going to be able to commit this work to trunk very soon! In Phase1 we built on top of Solr's distributed search capabilities and added cluster state, central config, and built-in read side fault tolerance. Phase 2 is even more ambitious and focuses on the write side.References ...

Dear Spring Community, We are pleased to announce the release of Spring Social 1.0.2 and Spring Social Twitter 1.0.2! Spring Social is an extension of the Spring Framework that enables you to connect your Java applications to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as Facebook and Twitter. These are primarily bug fix releases, but there are also a few small enhancements. Refer to the changelogs (Core | Twitter) for more details. We're also excited to announce that Spring Social LinkedIn 1.0.0.M5 is now available and includes a more complete API binding. We are looking forward to your feedback as we bring Spring Social LinkedIn closer to a 1.0.0 GA release. (Thanks again to Robert Drysdale for contributing the Groups API binding, completing Spring Social's LinkedIn API binding!) To get the software, download the release distribution (Core | Twitter) or simply add the maven artifacts to your project. To see it live, try out the quickstart and fire up the samples. Supplement as you go with information from the reference manual. Spring Social requires Spring Framework 3.0.5 or > to run. We recommend Spring 3.1 for new applications to take advantage of the latest advances in the core framework. See the reference manual for a full description of dependencies.

Ramnivas Laddad, Scott Andrews and Jennifer Hickey talk about using services with Cloud Foundry: Auto-reconfiguration, Cloud Namespace, Profile Support, Java Configuration and External Service Access. By Ramnivas Laddad, Scott Andrews and Jennifer Hickey

Nate Young presents parser combinators, what they are useful for and how to make use of them, demoing how to write one. By Nate Young

I saw a conversation on IRC today that really surprised me. basically, it went like this: guy comes in, and says "I need to write a library for service acquisition, so I can get a service with something like getService(PersonService.class)." This person was aware of Spring and Guice, and was told that he was to create his own instead of using a third party library. This is nuts.

Last year we saw the launch of a new Web programming language Dart - Structured Web Programming from Google. A very interesting approach to support web application development. Not so long after Go, Groovy, Ruby, Scala, << Name your DSL here >>; we see Dart. Is it a good thing to have at least one programming language to solve one problem? The answer is, like we already know, it...

I've been writing Java in one sense or another for a few years now. I learnt stuff at university, then used it in a few jobs. I've written Beans and Applets, and various bits of stuff in between. It's fairly safe to say, that I like Java. One thing however, that's been a pretty consistent bugbear in all the time I've been writing Java, has been the classpath, and dependency...

Tattletale is a highly useful development tool that not only has a catchy name, but also has a clever slogan: "Betraying your project's naughty little secrets." Tattletale scours JAR files to find various naught little secrets about dependencies, multiple versions, extraneous versions of classes, JARs in multiple locations, and so forth James...

I could not pay attention to the blog in the recent times and first and foremost I must apologize for not staying in touch with you all in the world of technology. I recently stumbled upon the java.lang.ref package which was available since Java 1.2 but ironically i got to know about it just a few days back. Going through a few articles explaining about the various reference types and the...

Inspired by an article done by Lincoln Baxter III about running JBoss on port 80, I decided to have a more detailed look at what's possible and necessary for GlassFish to utilize proxying and load-balancing.