Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in San Francisco and New York City talking to developers and toiling on the final edits to the O'Reilly book Cloud Native Java (almost there!). Also, marketing ninja Pieter Humphrey is ramping up the S1P 2016 replays, so fasten your seat belt and check the S1P 2016 YouTube playlist for the most current releases. We've got a lot to cover this week so let's get to it!

• Spring Cloud Task ninja Glen Renfro just announced Spring Cloud Task 1.1.1 with a fast following, bug-fix only, 1.1.2 release.
• our latest and greatest Spring Boot team member Madhura Bhave just announced Spring Boot 1.5.0.RC1
• Spring Integration guru Artem Bilan just announced Spring Integration 5.0.M2
• Spring Batch and Spring Cloud Task lead Michael Minella just announced Spring Batch 4.0 complete with a lot of niceties and - in particular a feature I've wanted forever - an easy way to build instances of the more sophisticated ItemReader and ItemWriter intances, including the FlatFileItemReader! This is been a long time in coming and I can't wait for this release. This rounds out the already epic Java configuration story for Spring Batch.
• Spring IO Platform lead Andy Wilkinson just announced Spring IO Platform Athens SR2, which brings with it new revisions of Spring Boot, Spring Retry, Spring AMQP and so much more
• Spring framework ninja and Kotlin afficianado Sebastien Deleuze just blogged about some of the coming improvements to support the Kotlin language in Spring framework 5
• Microservice developers working on security and service disovery won't want to miss Spencer Gibb's S1P 2016 replay: Spring Cloud with Consul and Vault. If you are new to Vault, Mark Paluch has you covered with a S1P replay that was published last week in Spring.
• Catch Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke as he delivers a Spring Data REST deep dive at S1P 2016, now on youtube!
• Shin Tanimoto's S1P 2016 session offers techniques for visualizing microservices built by Spring Boot applications using Elasticsearch, Kibana and Spring Cloud Sleuth.
• Apache Geode and Pivotal Gemfire enthusiasts won't want to miss this masterclass from hoopy froods John Blum and Luke Shannon about Spring Data and in memory data management in action, recorded at S1P 2016.
• Using Spring Boot on Cloud Foundry? Scott Frederick shows you how to wield autoconfiguration and the Java Buildpack like a boss to access platform and off-platform services in his talk recorded at S1P 2016.
• Are you a Apache Cassandra user? Spring Data experts Mark Paluch, John Blum talk about the community module turned 1st class project, Spring Data Cassandra in this S1P 2016 replay.
• Pivotal's very own Ben Wilcock put together a very nice example project that demonstrates how to use Spring Cloud Services with Pivotal Cloud Foundry
• He also put together a handy demo of Spring Cloud Contracts
• Our very own Toshiaki Maki Making put together a nice post on some of the niceties in Spring Boot 1.5 and how they integrate with the Pivotal Apps Manager for Cloud Foundry
• Daniel Olszewski has put together a quick and easy look at configuring time-to-live values for the Spring Cache abstraction
• I liked this German-language post on building REST services with Spring Boot
• Jose Praveen did a nice job demonstrating how to integrate an H2 database with a Spring Boot application
• I liked Sam Chu's Chinese-language post on setting up multiple MongoDB connections in a Spring application
• this is a well-thought out look at how to do validation of JSON payloads in a REST API