After a long and exciting journey we are pleased to announce the first Release Candidate of the Spring Cloud Stream Elmhurst release train - Elmhurst.RC1/2.0.0.RC1.

Spring Cloud Stream Elmhurst 2.0.0.RC1 is available for use in the Spring Milestone repository. The release notes include relevant information about version compatibility with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Spring AMQP, and Spring for Apache Kafka.

Given that this is a Release Candidate the following section provides a brief summary of features and improvements not just included in this release but for 2.0 in general, with details to follow in a form of upcoming blogs and documentation updates in preparation for 2.0.0.RELEASE.

New Features

• Polling Source as an alternative to the event-driven message consumption.
• Custom MessageConverters via @StreamMessageConverter annotation.
• New Test Binder - a binder backed by Spring Integration to support testing at the level of binder destinations rather then its internal channels.
• Actuator endpoints for binding control - allows one to not only see the existing bindings but to manage their lifecycle (i.e., stop/start etc)
• Micrometer, micrometer, micrometer! - Metrics support is now based on Micrometer
• Complete revamping of Kafka Streams binder - details to follow.

Improvements & enhancements

• Improved and consistent Content-Type negotiation
• StreamListener Infrastructure enhancements to deal with multiple destinations
• Configurable RetryTemplate
• Configurable Web environment - optional by default yet giving user a choice to bring reactive (Netty) or conventional (Tomcat) based on the provided boot starter.
• Partitioning is now Spring configured - providing for more user flexibility when customizations around partitioning is required.
• Actuator is becoming optional -
• Initializer (start.spring.io) improvements - improved user experience when creating new Spring Cloud Stream applications.

Various other enhancements and bug fixes

Once again huge thanks to all the community contributors!!! Without your help we wouldn't be here!

Next Steps

As mentioned the 2.0.0.RELEASE is planned in the next few weeks, so please take it for a spin stay tuned and tell us about it here.

As always, we welcome feedback and contributions, so please reach out to us on Stackoverflow or GitHub or via Gitter.