Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! Spring time is here! Astrologically and meteorlogically, speaking, of course. I love this season. Longer days, greener grass, bluer skies, and more. Next week, my family and I are headed to Hawaii for some much-needed R&R while my daughter has a week off from school. (It's hard to believe she might be going to college in another state in 18 short months! We need all the family vacations we can get together! T_T)

As always, we've got a lot to look at today, so let's dive right into it!

• First thing: Java 18 was released today! There are a ton new features, including UTF-8 by default, a simple HTTP server, a reimplementation of core reflection to use method handles, an SPI for internet resolution, an easier JavaDoc attribute to simplify the inclusion of code snippets in JavaDoc comments, and previews of a bunch of amazing new features including pattern matching for switch, Project Panama, the new Vector API (as in matrix multiplication, not a collection, exactly). There's also a switch you can use to disable finialization and finalizers, which you might want to try now to see if your application continues to do the right thing.
• The Spring for GraphQL project has a Twitter account (@SpringGraphQL)!
• A Bootiful Podcast: Elastic's Felix Barnsteiner on APM for Spring Developers
• BellSoft is excited to announce its new agreement with VMware.
• Blog: Meet Our Contributors - APAC (Aus-NZ region)
• I was happy to be on the Kong podcast to talk about how Spring changed Java application development
• Initial AOT support in Spring Framework 6.0.0-M3
• JDK 18
• Netty 5.0.0.Alpha1 released
• SimonHarmonicMinor/sneaky-java: Java utilities to throw checked exceptions in a "sneaky" way.
• Spring Data 2022.0.0-M2, 2021.2.0-M4, 2021.1.3, and 2021.0.10 released
• Spring Framework 6.0.0-M3 and 5.3.17 available now
• Spring Security 6.0.0-M3 and 5.7.0-M3 available now
• Spring Tips: Spring Shell and Spring Native
• Spring Tools 4.14.0 released
• Spring for GraphQL 1.0 Milestone 6 Released