Hi Spring fans and welcome to another installment of Spring Tips! This is a super exciting week! Spring Boot 2.0 is coming! Keep your eyes on the Spring Initializr or you'll miss it! :D

Today I was at the Okta Iterate conference talking to developers who are using Spring and Okta, thanks to my buddy Matt Raible. High point? I got to meet Jeff Atwood, the co-creator of Stack Overflow!

Tomorrow, I begin a whirlwind tour over the next two weeks. First, it's off to Glasgow, Scotland; then Sydney, Australia; then Dubai; then Bangalore, India (for Agile India 2018); and then it's off to Boston, Massachusetts for the SpringOne Tour event on March 13th. If you're in any of those places, don't hesitate to reach out…

This is the second blog in a series of pre-release blogs in preparation for Spring Cloud Stream 2.0.0.RELEASE.

Preface

Spring Cloud Stream 2.0 introduces polled consumers, where the application can control message processing rates.

Introduction

Spring Cloud Stream has the concepts of producers and consumers; when using the messaging paradigm, MessageChannels are bound to destinations (e.g. Kafka topics, Rabbit Exchanges/Queues). To-date, on the consumer side, messages are delivered whenever an idle consumer is available. In effect, the broker controls the rate of delivery; usually, the next…

This is the first blog in a series of pre-release blogs in preparation for Spring Cloud Stream 2.0.0.RELEASE.

Preface

Spring Cloud Stream 2.0 includes a complete revamp of content-type negotiation for the channel-based binders to address performance, flexibility and most importantly consistency. The following blog touches on some of the key points around what has been done, what to expect and how it may help you.

Introduction

Data transformation is one of the core features of any message-driven microservice architecture. In Spring Cloud Stream, such data is represented as a Spring Message.

…

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…

Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm speaking at the San Diego JUG with Mario Gray on testing with Spring. Then I'm off to the IBM Index conference here in San Francisco where I'll be talking about building reactive microservices, and then it's off to Devnexus in Atlanta, GA, where I'll be talking about Kotlin and testing. I hope you'll join me and say hi if you're nearby.

• Stéphane Nicoll has just announced Spring Framework 5.0.4.
• Check out this whitepaper on building flexible Spring Cloud Data Flow data pipelines
• It's now even easier to use Spring Cloud Stream from the Spring Initializr: now you need only choose a binder implementation (Kafka, or RabbitMQ) and then choose whether you want the implementation to be reactive or not, and you're off to the races!
• Spring Cloud Task lead Michael Minella just announced Spring Cloud Task 2.0.0.M3. The new release includes smarter default behavior when an application closes, the ability to restrict tasks from running concurrently, …

This article contains a short reminder of what Contract Testing is, how Spring Cloud Contract implements it, and how Spring Cloud Contract can be used in a polyglot world.

What is Contract Testing

In order to increase the certainty that our systems behave properly, we write different types of tests. According to the test pyramid the main types of tests are unit, integration, and UI. The more complex the tests, the more time and effort they require and the more brittle they become.

In a distributed system, one of the most frequent problems is testing integrations between applications. Let’s assume that your service sends a REST request to another application. When using Spring Boot, you can write a @SpringBootTest in which you test that behavior. You set up a Spring context, you prepare a request to be sent…​ and where do you send it? You haven’t started the other application, so you get a Connection Refused…

Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I've been in Munich and Frankfurt, Germany, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, and it looks like i'll be in New York City and San Francisco for the balance of the week.

We've got a lot to cover so without further ado so let's get started.

• Spring Cloud Contract lead Marcin Grzejszczak has just put together a very nice post on using Spring Cloud Contract in a polyglot world
• Spring Cloud Stream lead Oleg Zhurakousky just announced Spring Cloud Streamm Elmhurst M4 / 2.0.0.M4.
• Spring Integration legend Artem Bilan just announced the Spring Integration for AWS 2.0.0.M1 and Spring Cloud Stream Kinesis Binder 1.0.0.M1. This release highlights some of the things that we do to make the experience as valuable as possible for you, including - in this case - adapting the AWS…

The first and only release candidate planned for Spring Web Flow 2.5 is now available from the Spring Milestones repository. The samples repository has been updated to use it.

This release provides an upgrade path to Spring Framework 5 along with Java 8, Servlet 3.1, Hibernate 5, Tiles 3, and JSF 2.2 as minimum requirements.

In this release "spring-js" has been merged with "spring-webflow" so there is no longer a separate "spring-js" module. As a result some configuration classes have changed packages. The "spring-js-resources" module is still available but as an optional module that must be…

Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Stockholm, Sweden, for the epic (and snowy) JFokus event, then it's off to Frankfurt, Germany for the OOP show. If you're at either event, don't hesitate to reach out and say hi on Twitter (@starbuxman)!

• Spring Cloud Skipper 1.0.GA is here! A cross-cloud (Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes) option for continuous delivery/updating/rollback/query of Spring Boot-based applications. Spring Cloud Skipper underpins the recently added support in Spring Cloud Data Flow for versioning and rolling back stream definitions, but it's also useful in its own right.
• Spring Cloud Stream lead Oleg Zhurakousky just announced Spring Cloud Stream Elmhurst.M4 /2.0.0.M4 Release . The new release includes performance improvements around content-type resolution, Introduction of Polling Source as an alternative to the event-driven message consumption, StreamListener…