Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm recovering from a crazy awesome week at SpringOne Platform while visiting customers here in summer-time London.

We've got a lot to cover so let's get to it!

• the IntelliJ IDEA folks have updated their coverage on Spring
• there were several wrapup blogs from last week's SpringOne Platform event, including the two we published on this very blog for day 1

and day 2 and the posts on Pivotal's main blog for day 1, day 2, day 3, and final call

• while we're at the Pivotal blog, those of you wondering about Blockchain on Cloud Foundry might appreciate this post
• SpringOne Platform was filled with excellent keynotes, all of which will be available online already (or soon). Naturally, you have to watch Adrian Cockroft (@adrianco) 's excellent Simplifying the Future keynote: "Let's just do Spring Boot on Cloud Foundry."
• want to know about the future of the leading application server on the JVM, Apache Tomcat, for whose development Pivotal is a large sponsor? Check out this InfoQ interview with Pivotal's own Mark Thomas
• Last week we had the likes of James Governor from Redmonk and Charles Humble from InfoQ taking in the show and talking about it. I liked Charles Humble's coverage of the first day keynote - …

by Josh Long and Pieter Humphrey

Spring's central to a key message: software is business differentiating functionality, and everything that defers an organization's from delivering better software, faster and safer, should be automated or eliminated. SpringOne Platform captures that narrative with talks on all things continuous delivery.

The SpringOne Platform 2016 event shows how everything about this show has been bigger and better than ever! We've doubled the conference attendance from 2015, with record (2000+) attendees, 200+ talks, 30+ sponsors, amazing speakers from Netflix, Paypal…

Welcome to another very special installment of This Week in Spring - this week Pivotal is out in force at SpringOne Platform 2016. This year saw more people, more topics and more sponsors than ever! For more, check out our SpringOne Platform recap blog!

If you're not here, then fear not all the talks will be available online, but until then.. wish you were here! As with previous years, the race to SpringOne was filled with awesome releases that should keep you more than busy while you wait for the talks to be available online as replays! Let's get to it!

• Spring Boot co-lead Phillip Webb announced Spring Boot 1.4, just in time for SpringOne Platform!
• ..and Spring Boot ninja Stephane Nicoll announced Spring Boot 1.3.7
• Spring Data ninja Mark Paluch announced Spring Data Ingalls M1, packed with lots of new features (and 250 tickets fixed!) include for property access in conversion subsystem (Commons, MongoDB), an update to Cassandra 3.0 for Spring Data Cassandra,
…

It's my pleasure to announce that Spring IO Platform Athens-RC1 is available now from the Spring milestone repository.

This release is the first to adopt a new alphabetical versioning scheme similar to those already used by Spring Cloud and Spring Data. The theme for the Platform's versions is world cities.

The Athens release upgrades the versions of a number of projects:

• Spring Framework 4.3
• Spring AMQP 1.6
• Spring Boot 1.4
• Spring Data Hopper
• Spring Hateoas 0.20
• Spring Integration 4.3
• Spring LDAP 2.1
• Spring REST Docs 1.1
• Spring Security 4.1
• Spring Session 1.2
• Spring Web Services 2.3

The…

As Juergen mentioned in his Spring Framework 5 M1 release announcement our Spring Reactive initiative has been merged into Spring Framework proper preserving all contributions and its full history over more than a year.

What is it?

In a nutshell reactive programming is about non-blocking, event-driven applications that scale with a small number of threads with backpressure as a key ingredient that aims to ensure producers do not overwhelm consumers. The Reactive Streams specification (also adopted in Java 9) enables the ability to communicate demand across layers and libraries from different…

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! This week I'm mostly in San Francisco and Saint Louis, busily preparing for the big event next week!

This is my favorite time of year! As we lead to SpringOne Platform, there's so much good stuff being released that one can hardly keep up! I am really looking forward to this year's SpringOne Platform show, coming in early August. It's an amazing time to build applications, and SpringOne Platform is in a unique position to capture the larger discussion: why do we #devops, #cloud, #agile, or #microservice? Join the discussion August 1-…

On behalf of the Spring Cloud team it is my pleasure to announce the 1.0.0.M1 release of the new Spring Cloud project called Spring Cloud Contract. You can grab it from the Spring’s milestone repository or even better - go to start.spring.io and pick it from there.

Spring Cloud Contract

The microservice approach has plenty of benefits but also introduces complexity. This is an inevitable result of working with distributed systems: with increasing complexity inevitably more questions are posed. In this article we show how to test microservices and create a better API by using the Consumer…

In this article we continue the series on Reactive Programming, and the focus is less on learning the basic APIs and more on more concrete use cases and writing code that actually does something useful. We will see how Reactive is a useful abstraction for concurrent programming, but also that it has some very low level features that we should learn to treat with respect and caution. If we start to use these features to their full potential we can take control of layers in our application that previously were invisible, hidden by containers, platforms and frameworks.

Bridging from Blocking to…

A new Spring Web Flow 2.4.4 maintenance release is now available for download or use from Maven and Gradle builds. This release extends compatibility to Hibernate 5.2 and also includes several mainly JSF related fixes.