Show of hands: Who’s on Facebook? Any Twitter users reading this? Almost everyone I know is on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or some other social network site. In fact, most people I know maintain a presence on multiple social network sites. According to recent numbers thrown about, Facebook has over 750 million users and Twitter has Read more...

Last week, I introduced you to Spring Social's Service Provider "Connect" Framework and showed you how it simplifies creating connections between a user's local application account and their accounts on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers. Today I want to show you how to extend the service provider framework to handle connections to providers that aren't directly supported Read more...

In my previous post, I introduced you to Spring Social's Java bindings to popular Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) APIs such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TripIt. In addition to providing simple, strongly-typed Java methods for common API operations, these bindings ensure each HTTP request includes the credentials required to authorize your application to invoke the API on Read more...

Increasingly, web surfers are using the internet to connect with friends, family, and colleagues using social networking sites. Conversations that once took place over email are now taking place in short messages written on someone's Facebook wall or in a brief tweet on Twitter. Connections once made with a handshake are now created using LinkedIn. Read more...

Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past few years or are completely detached from the Java community, you have no doubt heard of Spring. Nothing has changed the face of Java development as much as Spring. What started out as a challenge to complex and burdensome enterprise Java standards has now deposed those standard and has heavily influenced newer specifications. Spring is, in fact, considered by many to be a de facto standard for enterprise Java development.

But Spring didn't stop with simplifying enterprise Java development. As Spring has evolved, there have been simplifications to Spring itself. With each new version, Spring not only offers greater development power, but has also found ways to simplify its own programming model. What used to take pages and pages of XML-based configuration has now been replaced with more succinct XML, common conventions, and even annotation-based options.

If you're new to Spring and want to see how to use it in your applications or if you're a Spring veteran who is looking to leverage the new features and ease of the latest versions of Spring, then let me encourage you to attend Java Development with Spring, a course that I'll be teaching in Dallas next week. In this 3-day course, we'll go through all of the essentials of working with Spring and you'll get a chance to try it out in hands-on lab activities.

This course will be held at the Improving Enterprises office in Dallas, TX (map) on April 13-15. I really hope to see you there.

For those of you who can't make it, you can catch me at several stops of the No-Fluff/Just-Stuff tour this year. I'm currently slated to speak in:

• Bloomington, IL : April 10
• Reston, VA: May 1-2
• St. Louis, MO: May 22
• Dallas, TX: June 4-6
• Columbus, OH: June 26-27
• Salt Lake City, UT: July 9

And I'll also be at Dallas TechFest on July 30.

See ya soon!