Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Kansas City, Kansas; and Phoenix, Arizona talking to customers and Pivotal partners about all things Spring and Cloud Foundry. If you're around don't hesitate to say hi!

We've got a lot to cover this week, so let's get started!

• Mark Fisher debuted the first look at Spring Cloud Function, an abstraction that brings the function-as-a-service paradigm to your Spring applications. This is a must-read!
• Spring (big-)Data ninja Thomas Risberg just announced Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.5.0 GA which mostly includes bugfixes and dependency updates.
• Spring Cloud co-founder just announced the first milestone of Spring Cloud Finchley. This release is the first to be based on the upcoming Spring Boot 2.0 baseline with one major new feature: a new microproxy called Spring Cloud Gateway which we see as a replacement for Zuul 1.
• Spring Tool Suite 3.9.0 released - Spring Tool Suite lead Martin Lippert just announced Spring Tool Suite 3.9.0 which in turn builds upon Eclipse Oxygen. It also includes improved Spring Cloud integration and support for editing Cloud Foundry manifests.
• this post looks at using the Spring Framework JmsTemplate with an embedded ActiveMQ instance.
• most people don't realize that Spring integrates a very powerful Aspect-oriented programming library called AspectJ. This post introduces AspectJ in terms of a Spring Boot application.
• Jane Elizabeth has a nice writeup of Spring Cloud Function over on JAXEnter
• Oracle have announced as massive-online-only-course on developing REST applications with Spring Boot. Sounds interesting!
• Check out Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke's JAX talk on domain-driven design vs. REST
• this looks interesting - it's a miniature workflow engine - called Piper - built on top of Spring Boot. Nice work Arik!