This Year in Spring - 2017

Engineering | Josh Long | December 27, 2017 | ...

Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another, albeit very special, installment of This Week in Spring! This is the last installment before 2018 and so we'll take the opportunity to review, as we always do in the last installment of the year, this very exciting year in Spring and its ecosystem.

Let me, on behalf of the Spring and larger Pivotal team, to be the first to wish you and yours a heartfelt happy and safe New Year! Let's first look at some of the major trends that defined 2017. We've got a lot to cover!

  • Spring Framework 5 and Reactive Programming - this year we released Spring Framework 5.0. This release is huge - packed to the gills with new features including support for Java EE 8, Java SE 9 and - of course - reactive programming based on Project Reactor and the fully-reactive new web runtime called Spring WebFlux. The web runtime supports a Spring MVC-like component model as well as a new handler model (called functional reactive endpoints) and a new, fully reactive HTTP client called WebClient. Spring Framework 5's reactive support, as impressive as it is, is only the beginning. Spring Framework 5.0 is the foundation for reactive data access support in Spring Data Kay, for reactive security integration in Spring Security 5.0 and for reactive messaging in Spring Cloud Stream. All of these will bubble up to Spring Boot 2.0 which in turn lays the foundation for Spring Cloud Finchley. Both will debut in GA form in 2018. The release of our reactive programming support dovetails nicely with our first-class Kotlin support which debuted in Spring Framework 5 and has extended to a handful of other projects, notably the brand new Spring Cloud Gateway project which will also debut in Spring Cloud Finchley.
  • PCF 2.0 - Pivotal Cloud Foundry 2.0 has been released!. This is a big release for us. It marks an important fork in the road. We envision PCF as being a universal cloud that supports functions/serverless, containers and higher order applications. We'll support serverless and functions using Project Riff in what we're calling Pivotal Function Service (PFS). We support containers - ideal for stateful workloads like Apache Spark or ElasticSearch - in the Pivotal Container Service (PKS). We support stateless, 12-factor applications using Pivotal Application Service (PAS). I love this look at PCF 2.0 from CTO Onsi Fakhouri.
  • SpringOne Platform 2017 - this year's developer conference was bigger and better than ever! We had close to 3,000 people turn up at this show. We had users of every stripe tell the story of their journeys to production. Check out all the technical talks and testimonials from the SpringOne Platform 2017 YouTube playlist where you'll find hundreds of videos for your binge-watching enjoyment.
  • Functions-as-a-service or serverless - this year saw us enter the serverless fray in earnest, first with Spring Cloud Function and then Project Riff which will underpin the Pivotal Function Service in Pivotal Cloud Foundry 2.0.
  • Pivotal Container Service (PKS) - we knew last year that when we announced, in cooperation with Google, the support for managing Kubernetes using BOSH as part of Project Kubo, that it would resonate. This year we've seen that partnership and growth skyrocket as the Pivotal Container Service (PKS).

And now, let's run through some of the happenings in this last week of 2017!

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