Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Nashville, TN, for a meetup presentation on Reactive Spring and then it's off to Kansas City, KS for a replay of the same talk. Both times I'll be joined by pal Mark Heckler. If you're in either of those cities, don't miss this!

I'm working on the next installments of Spring Tips: what would you like to see covered? Let me know on Twitter on @SpringTipsLive.

This week we have a truly massive good many things to look at so let's get started!

• Spring messaging and integration maestro Artem Bilan just announced Spring for Apache Kafka 2.0 M3. The new release includes, among other things, a new KafkaTransactionManager and according supportin the KakfaTemplate.
• Spring Session 2.0 M3 Released - Spring Security and Session ninja Joe Grandja just announced Spring Session 2.0.M3. This new release adds support for Spring WebFlux, and its WebSession and reactive programming in general.
• Not one to rest on his laurels, Christoph Strobl also announced the new release of Spring Data Kay RC1 and RC2. These releases include Spring Data for Apache Geode, reactive tuning, a Cassandra v3.0 driver upgrade and so much more, including 120+ tickets fixed!
• Christoph Strobl just announced just announced a massive Spring Data Ingalls SR5 release with over 40 issues fixed.
• Spring Integration 5.0 Milestone 6 Available - Spring Integration ninja Artem Bilan just announced Spring Integration 5.0M6. This release includes support for the reactive HTTP channel adapter, convenient integration with Spring Cloud Function, a new JDBC metadata store, and so much more.
• Spring Data ninja Thomas Risberg announced the Spring Cloud Data Flow 1.2.3 maintenance release which include, among other things, an OSS-licensed SQL Server JDBC driver and improved reference documentation.
• Spring Boot and Cloud Foundry ninja Madhura Bhave just announced Spring Boot 2.0.0.M3 which pulls in Spring Framework 5RC3 and closes over 100 tickets! Get the bits now!
• Spring Batch lead Michael Minella has just announced Spring Batch 4.0.0.M3. This new release further improves the Java Configuration builders for various ItemReader and ItemWriters. It also end-of-lifes the Spring Batch Admin. You should use Spring Cloud Data Flow, instead.
• Hurray! Spring Session Data Geode 2.0.0.M1 is now available. This is a Spring Session integration that builds upon Spring Data Geode (which also supports Pivotal's Gemfire product). Spring Data Geode’s @ClientCacheApplication and Spring Session Data Geode’s @EnableGemFireHttpSession annotations turn your Spring Boot application into a Geode cache client capable of managing the HTTP Session state by distributing data to a cluster of Geode servers for fast and reliable (replicated) access. Nice work to Spring Data legend John Blum and team! This is such a cool release.
• Spring Vault lead Mark Paluch's announced Spring Vault 1.1.0.M1 and 2.0.0.M2. Both new releases include AWS IAM Vault login, rotation of generic secrets based on their lease duration, and an introduction of VaultEndpointProvider to configure endpoints dynamically. Additionally, 2.0.0.M2 includes an authentication DSL, reactive Spring Framework 5 integration, and enhanced nullability support.
• Spring Boot 1.5.6 available now - There was a small issue in the Spring Boot 1.5.5 release, so get 1.5.6, instead.
• Spring Session MongoDB 2.0.0.M2 released - Spring legend Greg Turnquist just announced Spring Sessions MongoDB 2.0.0.M2. This new release brings in new dependencies and integrates with Spring Framework 5's reactive support.
• Spring Security OAuth ninja Joe Grandja just announced Spring Security OAuth 2.2.0.RELEASE. This is a packed release, so congratulations to the Spring Security team on a job well done!
• Spring Framework 5 Kotlin APIs, the functional way - Sébastien Deleuze looks at a number of the nice improvements in Spring Framework 5's native support for the Kotlin-language. There's so much to love here! Some of the efforts - like a focus on nullability checks - also bleed through and improve the lives of Java developers using Spring, as well.
• While we recommend Spring Cloud Data Flow for anybody who wants to manage and interrogate Spring Batch jobs, you can still use Spring Batch Admin and you can even run it in a Spring Boot environment, as this sample from Joris Kuipers demonstrates.
• ADTMag has a nice look at the recent Spring Framework 5.0RC3 release.
• Dawn of the Age of Kotlin at Hootsuite – Code @ Hootsuite - Hootsuite talks about their use of the Kotlin language. In this post they look at their motivations and the issues they've encountered when using it for Android development.
• Verizon's Josh Stone talks about the experience of running Cloud Foundry at scale
• my friend Harry Zhang points out that the Container Storage Interface will be a very promising project in that it involves participants from Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, Mesos, and Docker.
• Coding Dojo has apparently dropped their Ruby on Rails bootcamp, due to waning interest, and are now running a Spring workshop, instead. I've, personally, seen this effect a lot in recent years. I think that this says two things: a) Ruby on Rails has been an amazing boon for the industry b) Spring must be doing something right if people are opting to use it instead of Ruby on Rails! Why don't you try it for yourself?
• Codecentric's Johannes Edmeier shares the good news that there have been more than six million downloads of the Codecentric Spring Boot Admin Server! This is very promising news! Learn more here about various dashboard options for your Spring Boot-based applications
• Why PCF is the best platform for Spring Boot - Pivotal's own Toshiaki Maki has put together an awesome look at why Cloud Foundry, and specifically Pivotal's Cloud Foundry, is the best experience for developers using Spring.
• Michael Kops has a nice post on testing Spring Boot-based REST APIs with Karate, a web testing framework.
• Charity Majors has a great post, "Ops: It's Everyone's Job Now!" which urges software developers to embrace operations-minded thinking. This is critical if we're to, as a community, move to higher order systems and deliverables.
• Dan Vega has a nice post on configuring multiple HTTP request mappings for Spring MVC endpoints.
• The Grails project lead, Graeme Rocher, just announced Grails 3.3.GA. Check it out!
• Want a full-featured example Spring Cloud application? You might like this resilient demo by Benjamin Wilms.
• Rod Johnson, creator of Spring, look at his company Atomist's technology for automating and drastically simplifying project initialization. Atomist looks at more than just code-generation and focuses on infrastructure like cloud-platform integration, lifecycle, repositories, Slack integration, etc.