Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's the second week of 2024, and I am already thinking about 2025! And, a bit more immediatelt than that: the next two weeks. I'll be at both VOXXED DAYS Ticino and VOXXED DAYS CERN, both in Switzerland. If you're about, come out and say hi!

This year is going to be amazing!

And this week's been amazing, too. Let's dive into it.

• in last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast, I talked to my friend and Kubernetes guru Leigh Capili
• Spring Shell 3.1.7 and 3.2.0 is now available
• Spring Boot Kafka and websockets: a practical approach to real time messaging
• Like Lombok? Me too. But some folks on the Java team will remind you that it's built on intrinsic, unsupported internal bits of the JDK and JRE and that it's doomed to failure without some major changes. Soooo... maybe it's time to start looking for more well-supported alternatives? One such thing that handles a very specific feature of Lombok is Jilt, which gives you a Java annotationm processor to generate builders for objects. Neat.
• https://github.com/paketo-buildpacks/health-checker
• I love this blog on Digma.ai: 25 reasons why Java is still around in 2023
• Our pal and principal developer advocate over at Microsoft Mark Heckler has a nice video on how to use Spring AI and Azure AI together: nice!
• I love this blog on some ways to improve memory efficiencies in a Java Spring Boot application
• Remember Optaplanner? Well, it's been forked and has grown considerably in a new project called Timefold, which has a great Spring Boot integration, about which you can learn here
• fellow Java Champion Simon Martinelli has a nice blog on testing with [Spring Boot and JMS and Artemis and Testcontainers](https://martinelli.ch/testing-spring-boot-jms-with-artemis-and-testcontainers/]