Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it! This week I'm supposed to be in Paris and Belgium. Unfortunately, because of the recent, tragic, disgusting and cowardly attacks on the Brussels airport and metro, I am not entirely sure about whether I'll be in Belgium physically. Tonight's meetup talk, however, will carry on remotely, via streaming. Stay tuned to my Twitter handle - @starbuxman for more.

That said, there's a lot of great content so let's get to it!

• Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke has just announced the first release candidate of Spring Data Hopper.
• our local Spring and Kotlin ninja Sebastien Deleuze has put together a blog demonstrating some interesting applications of Spring and Kotlin in his sample application, a GeoSpatial Messenger.
• Spring Security lead Rob Winch has announced Spring Security SAML 1.0.2.
• Spring Tool Suite lead Martin Lippert continues his series on using Spring Boot and Cloud Foundry from the Spring Tool Suite. This installment looks at Cloud Foundry manifests, among other things.
• Spring Security and Spring Session lead Rob Winch has just announced two new cuts: Spring Session 1.2.0.RC1 and Spring Session 1.1.1…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! What a crazy week it's been since we last talked! I spent a day in San Francisco, Germany, Scotland, and Romania between Monday and Friday last. It's nice this week to be in (warm!) southern California in Los Angeles and San Diego speaking to customers and at a couple of meetups! If you're around, I hope you'll join me for the Cloud Native Meetup here in Los Angeles (tonight!).

• the 2016 NFJS tour has just kicked off, first in Minneapolis. The amazing Craig Walls and Matt Stine be presenting at most of the NFJS shows in 2016 on all manner of topics including Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Spring Security, Spring Data, Spring Cloud Data Flow, and (later this year) Spring’s new reactive stuff. Make sure to check out the event in your city!
• JUnit 5 is coming! Check out Lukas Eder's quick runthrough of some of the new features in JUnit 5. JUnit 5 is critical infrastructure code, and it's for this reason that we at Pivotal were happy to help sponsor some of its development.
• Get the …

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Bruhl, Germany for the amazing JavaLand show, then it's off to Scotland to visit a large customer, and then it's off to Romania for Voxxed Days Bucharest. If you're in any of those places, I'd love to connect!

• Spring ninja Stephane Nicoll introduces some of the niceties in Spring framework 4.3
• Do not miss Micah Silverman's upcoming webinar introducing the amazing Stormpath and Spring/Spring Boot-based integration and Auto-configuration. Stormpath is an epic identity provider as-a-service. It's ideal for cloud-based applications.
• Spring IO Platform lead Andy Wilkinson just announced Spring IO Platform 2.0.3
• From SpringOne2GX 2015, Integration lead Gary Russell shows us how RabbitMQ powers Spring XD
• Thomas Risberg, also from SpringOne2GX 2015, shows us how simpler Hadoop workflows, and distribution portability make raw Hadoop much simpler for Spring developers. …

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week, I'm in Shenzhen, China and Zurich, Switzerland for Voxxed Days Zurich. It's going to be a busy week indeed though I sure hope to see you there! Anyway, we've got a lot to cover this week so let's get to it!

• Spring Boot ninja Stéphane Nicoll has just announced Spring Boot 1.4.0M1 with excellent couchbase support
• Spring Session lead Rob Winch, never resting on his laurels, just announced Spring Session 1.1.0
• Also not resting on his laurels, Stéphane just announced Spring Framework 4.2.5, chock full 'o bug fixes and updates
• Spring XD lead Mark Pollack has just announced that Spring XD 1.3.1 is now GA, along with Spring Flo for XD 1.0.1 GA
• Martin Lippert, the lead developer on Spring Tool Suite, has added better support for both Spring Boot and Cloud Foundry, as well as picking up the latest Eclipse Mars distro, in …

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! We're already staring down the last weeks of February!

• Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke has just announced Spring Data Gosling SR4 containing 45 bugfixes. Get it while it's hot!
• Want to learn more about Spring Data Gosling? Check out this replay of Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke's introduction too the new bits
• the first milestone of Spring Integration 4.3, the last in the 4.x series, has arrived! Lots of small new features to tide you over before Spring framework 5 and the reactive support there become the baseline for Spring integration 5
• Let's hear it for women in tech! Ludwine Probst & Ilayaperumal Gopinathan bring you this SpringOne2GX 2015 replay: …

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's been a busy week for all of us on the Spring team, as you're about to see! I've just finished my presentation at the epic DevNexus show and now I'm off to visit customers in Hartford and Los Angeles before making my way to the epic ConFoo conference in Montreal, Canada. If you're in the area, be sure to ping me and say hi!

We've got a lot to cover, so let's get to it!

• Reactor project lead Stephane Maldini just announced Reactor 2.5: A Second Generation Reactive Foundation for the JVM. This is a huge part of our continued efforts to better support reactive workloads with Spring.
• We've added a new language, Kotlin, to the Spring Initializr! To learn more check out this great post by Sebastien Deleuze on Developing Spring Boot applications with Kotlin
• Spring Integration and Spring AMQP lead Gary Russell's just announced Spring AMQP 1.6.0 Milestone 1 (and 1.5.4) Available
• Spring REST Docs lead Andy Wilkinson's just announced Spring REST Docs 1.1.0.M1
• last week, Spring Data Couchbase 2.0 went GA, and this week I'm pleased to share a guest post from project lead Simon Baslé introducing …

I was inspired by OpenZipkin contributor and Spring Cloud Sleuth and Zipkin contributor Adrian Cole's epic talk introducing Zipkin to write this particular post. There's so much epic stuff in that talk, so once you're done reading this, go watch that!

Advances in technology and cloud computing have made it easier to stand up and deploy services with ease. Cloud computing enables us to automate away the pain (from days or weeks (gasp!) to minutes!) associated with standing up new services. This increase in velocity in turn enables us to be more agile, to think about smaller batches of…

This is a cross-post blog from Simon BASLÉ from Couchbase. You can find him on twitter (@simonbasle) or github. Learn more about Couchbase and the Couchbase Java SDK on the developer portal. Thanks again, Simon and great job to you and your team! -Josh

Spring Data Couchbase 2.0 is a rewrite of the original Spring Data Couchbase 1.4.x connector. It is based on the Couchbase Java 2.2 SDK and makes heavy use of the new query language N1QL (which was introduced in Couchbase Server 4.0) to offer more features for Spring Data users.

The first Milestone has been released last august, then a Release…

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in beautiful Stockholm, Sweden at the amazing JFokus conference. It's also Shrove Tuesday here in Sweden and the custom is to over-indulge, so as I type this I am eating a Semla. I hope you too enjoy over-indulging on this week's epic roundup!

• the world's worst kept secret is finally announced! We've been developing a reactive runtime for Spring MVC, and you can start to kick the tires! Check out this amazing blog on Spring 5's ambitions for reactive web programming!
• Spring Cloud Stream lead Marius Bogoevici has just announced Spring Cloud Stream 1.0.0.M4 which, among other things, defaults to publish/subscribe semantics, supports a notion of consumer groups, provides a simplified binder SPI, resettable Kafka offsets, and so much more! Check it out!
• the 2.0.0.RELEASE of Spring Data Couchbase just dropped!…

I received an email recently that asked about how to forward control from a wait-state in an Activiti (which is an open-source BPMN2 workflow engine from Alfresco) to a Spring Integration flow and then resume execution of the Activiti workflow process upon completion of some work in Spring Integration.

To really appreciate why this is useful goal, we need some background.

What is Activiti

Activiti is a business process engine. It's basically a directed graph of nodes (states) that model the states of a complex business process. It keeps track of the progression of work described in a business…