On behalf of the community, I'm pleased to announce the release of Spring Session 1.2.0.RC3. The release can be found in the Spring Milestone Repository (https://repo.spring.io/milestone/).

This release contains some fixes for the previous release.

Some highlights of the issues in this release include:

• JDBC Support persists session attributes on a separate table. This was in response to the community feedback (thanks!)
• Redis Session optimization
• Preparations for improved Spring Boot auto configuration
• Updated to Spring Data Hopper

See What's New in 1.2 for more details.

Our Community Support

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Budapest, Hungary, for the amazing Craft Conf. This show is a very special show indeed. Special, for me, first in that I'll be joined by industry titans like Adrian Cochroft, Jez Humble, Sam Newman, and Kyle Kingsbury, and in that I'll join two of my friends from Pivotal - Andrew Clay Shafer and Bridget Kromhout (also titans)! I'm so excited to be among these, and many more, that I can hardly contain it and I recommend you consider making the trip if it's convenient, one day, yourself.

Now then, we've got a lot to get…

Following previous Reactive Spring and Reactor Core 3.0 blog posts, I would like to explain why Reactive types are useful and how they compare to other asynchronous types, based on what we have learned while working on the Spring Framework 5 upcoming Reactive support.

Why using Reactive types?

Reactive types are not intended to allow you to process your requests or data faster, in fact they will introduce a small overhead compared to regular blocking processing. Their strength lies in their capacity to serve more request concurrently, and to handle operations with latency, such as requesting…

The latest milestone version of Spring Cloud is "Brixton.RC2" and it is available now from the usual repositories (details in the home page). This is a bugfix release building on the RC1, and there are no notable new features. If all goes well we'd like to get to a RELEASE in a week or two.

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Stuttgart and Mainz, Germany and Paris, France, speaking to customers and at the JAX conference, then it's off to Paris, France, to speak at the Devoxx France edition. If you're around in any of these places don't hesitate to reach out I'd love to say hello.

Also, tonight, I'll be joining my friends from industry (Daniel Bryant, Markus Eisele, and Simon Maple) for the ZeroTurnaround webinar, Microservices for the Enterprise. There are already more than 3,000 people registered and I hope to see you there, as well!

As usual…

One of the nice things about working for Pivotal is that they have a great agile development division called Pivotal Labs. The teams within Labs are big proponents of Lean and XP software methodologies such as pair programming and test-driven development. Their love of testing has had a particular impact on Spring Boot 1.4 as we've started to get great feedback on things that could be improved. This blog post highlights some of the new testing features that have just landed in the latest M2 release.

Testing without Spring

The easiest way to unit test any Spring @Component is to not involve…

The Bigger Picture

Let's talk about Pivotal. Our ambition is to make business more agile, to reduce the time around the innovation loop; speed is the single biggest advantage an organization can have. Pivotal's main "product" is agility. This translates naturally into technology. Microservices are well-defined, small, easy-to-evolve, independently deployable batches of functionality. They lend themselves to rapid iteration because they're small. Spring Boot and the Spring ecosystem make short work of standing up new microservices and applications, and Spring Cloud handles the complexity in…

This is a cross-post blog from Simon BASLÉ from Couchbase. You can find him on twitter (@simonbasle) or github. Learn more about Couchbase and the Couchbase Java SDK on the developer portal.

Spring Boot 1.4.0 MILESTONE 2 is out! This is a good time to tell you about the joint effort between Spring Boot team members and the Couchbase Java SDK team to offer a first class integration of Couchbase into Spring Boot :)

In Spring Boot 1.4.0, Couchbase becomes a first class citizen of the Spring Boot ecosystem!

Couchbase SDK Integration

Spring Boot now directly recognizes when you have the Couchbase SDK in your classpath. And when that's the case, it instantiates a Cluster and a Bucket bean for you using autoconfiguration…

This article explains some of the dependency management tricks that can be used to create libraries and apps that depend on newer versions of a transitive dependency than that managed by a platform like Spring Boot or the Spring IO Platform. The examples below uses Reactor as an example of such a dependency because it is nearing a major new release (2.5.0) but existing dependency management platforms (Spring Boot 1.3.xq) declare a dependency on older versions (2.0.7). If you wanted to write an app that depended on a new version of Reactor through a transitive dependency on a library…