Wow! It's December 15th, friends; many of us on this planet will soon celebrate a new year! Hopefully, you've done a better job than I have of getting all my new year's resolutions finished in time for 2016! If you haven't, at least catching up on the latest and greatest in the Pivotal community won't be insurmountable! Let's see what's happened this week..

• Greg Turnquist's epic blog series on using Spring with React.js is now available online as a tutorial
• Spring Batch lead Michael Minella just announced Spring Batch 3.0.6 which contains lots of great contributions and bug fixes from the community
• the good Dr. David Syer put together a very good look at Spring Boot's memory characteristics in various configurations
• Spring RestDocs lead Andy Wilkinson just announced Spring Rest Docs 1.0.1 which is maintenance release that includes a number of changes, including improved support for documenting attributes in XML payloads. An immediate
• Spring Social lead Craig Walls has been hard at work adapting Spring Social to a recent breaking change…

Greetings Spring Community,

I hope you enjoyed my blog series on React.js + Spring Data REST. In that series, you got to build up a rich web app with hypermedia controls, conditional operations, messaging, and security.

To make things even better, that series has been bundled up and converted into a tutorial: https://spring.io/guides/tutorials/react-and-spring-data-rest/

Some key updates made along the way:

• require.js has been replaced with webpack as the JavaScript module builder/loader of choice
• The code is upgraded to ES6. This means that some of JavaScript's newest features like classes, arrow functions, and more are being used.
• bower has been replaced by npm as the package manager of choice
…

It has sometimes been suggested that Spring and Spring Boot are "heavyweight", perhaps just because they allow apps to punch above their weight, providing a lot of features for not very much user code. In this article we concentrate on memory usage and ask if we can quantify the effect of using Spring? Specifically we would like to know more about the real overhead of using Spring compared to other JVM applications. We start by creating a basic application with Spring Boot, and look at a few different ways to measure it when it is running. Then we look at some comparison points: plain Java…

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Chicago speaking to customers and then it's off to Washington D.C., and New York City for Cloud Native meetups! I hope you'll consider joining us at either event!

Time sure is flying! We're darned close to 2016!

Anyway, as usual, lots to cover so let's get to it!

• I really like the looks of this Caffeine local cache. It uses a pretty interesting algorithm to ensure near optimal cache hits It already features a JSR 170 (JCache) integration which means using it could be as simple as configuring the JCache adapter along with Spring's Cache abstraction.
• I really enjoyed Pivotal Labs' Brian Kelly's presentation, Spring Boot for Rails Developers. Check it out!
• 3Pillar has an interesting post on using Spring Boot with Docker
• Spring Framework lead Juergen Hoeller has revisited the Spring 5.0 roadmap in light of the recent 6 month delay for JDK 9
• Spring RestDocs lead, Spring IO Platform lead, and Spring Boot ninja Andy Wilkinson …

Wow! Can you believe we're already staring down 2016? Time sure flies! Remember, This Week in Spring was started the first week of 2011, so we'll soon mark the fifth anniversairry of TWiS!

This week I'm in Shanghai, China, for the Cloud Foundry Summit Asia and then off to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA, for the Rich Web Experience! If you're in either place, don't hesitate to reach me!

As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it!

• Spring Boot co-founder and Spring framework contributor Phil Webb put up a really thoughtful post helping people looking at Spring (which has been around for 10+ years) to avoid some of the common pitfalls facing new developers in 2016. A very recommended read!
• Florian Benz did a great job discussing the motivations and use of comprehensive REST documentation as generated with Spring Rest Docs. This is a really cool, quick read!
• Speaking of Spring Rest Docs, there's a great interview with the project lead, the amazing Andy Wilkinson who - in his ample free time - also manages the Spring IO Platform as well as contributes to Spring Boot. Read on to learn more about one of my heroes…

There are some new features in Spring Boot 1.3 to do with OAuth2 clients and servers and Spring Security OAuth2. Some of those features were ported from Spring Cloud Security and hence were in the Angel release train of Spring Cloud, but are not in the Brixton release train. This article helps you navigate the changes and update any existing apps to use the new features.

Dependency Management

If you are not using Spring Cloud you should be able to just change the version number of your Spring Boot dependency. Since some of the OAuth2 features migrated from Spring Cloud Security to Spring Boot in 1.3, it is likely that things are slightly more complicated than that. A separate article deals with upgrading Spring Cloud apps from Spring Boot 1.2 to 1.3. If you are using the Spring Cloud Angel release train then you should consult that…

Over the Thanksgiving weekend a 2014 article called "Why I hate Spring" by Sam Atkinson started doing the rounds on Twitter. It's always interesting to listen to criticisms to see what we can do to improve Spring, much of Spring Boot was born out of listening to people talk about the problems that they faced with the framework.

In this blog post, I'll try to address some of the concerns discussed in Sam's article, and describe my personal Spring "best practices". Before we get too much into the details though, it's worth considering why less than optimal ways of doing things still exist in the…

There are some interesting new features in Spring Boot 1.3 that are now available in Spring Cloud in the Brixton release train. The Angel release train of Spring Cloud is partly incompatible with Spring Boot 1.3, so when you upgrade there are some important things to be aware of. This article helps you navigate the changes and update any existing apps to use the new features. It should also be helpful generally when trying to adopt new versions of Spring projects into existing codebases.

TIP: You can use mvn dependency:tree or gradle dependencies to list the dependencies in your project and check the versions.

…

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! Here in the US it's the week of Thanksgiving, where - hopefully - we take a moment to note the many things for which we're thankful. I'm sure I speak for the whole team here at Pivotal when I say: we're thankful for you, dear community. Thank you.

And so, as usual, we've got a lot to get to it. All the better, in fact, for the lazy hours after turkey!

• Dr. Mark Pollack has just announced the release of Spring XD 1.3 GA and Spring Flo for Spring XD 1.0. This is a huge release! Spring XD 1.3.0 supports job composition DSLs, Spring Flo for Spring XD, an improved Admin UI, Spark 1.3.1, updates to the Spring Data and Spring for Hadoop distributions, a Cassandra Sink and much more! It is also the last in the line before Spring XD completes its journey to the archhitecture already partially laid out in Spring Cloud Stream and Spring Cloud Dataflow! This is an exciting evolution of the technology!
• Spring Security and Spring Session lead Rob Winch has just announced Spring Session 1.1.0.M1 complete with a lot of new features: searching HTTP sessions by username, HttpSessionListener support, customized Cookie creation, overriding the default RedisSerializer…