Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As I write this, I'm in Chennai, India, en route to Bangalore, India for a day of exciting customer meetings and then I'm off to sunny Barcelona, Spain, for the epic Spring IO event! Then, this Friday, I'm off to Kiev, Ukraine, for JEEConf. If you're around, as always, don't be shy and say hi!. That said, let's get into it!

• The BIG news: Spring Cloud Brixton is now available! Get the bits from the Spring Initializr. If you'll permit a little back-patting, I submit that you might get a good feel for what concerns a technology like Spring Cloud addresses by reading this article I wrote and you'll learn how Spring Boot and Spring Cloud are used in this video. That said, grab the bits and go!
• Spring Cloud Stream 1.0.0 is here, at long last! Spring Cloud stream makes it simple to build collaborating messaging-based microservices.
• Spring Boot co-lead Phil Webb just announced that Spring Boot 1.4.0.M3 is now available, just in time…

Auntie Em! Time sure is flying! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Warsaw for a Cloud Native meetup and Krakow, Poland for the spectacular Geecon event! If you're around, don't hesitate to say hi for Also, some very big news coming! Stay tuned to the Spring.io blog tomorrow! Anyway, as usual, we've got a lot to look at so let's get to it!

• Spring Security lead Rob Winch just announced Spring Security 4.1.0 RELEASE! This is a big release with a lot of cool stuff!
• Spring IO Platform lead Andy Wilkinson just announced Spring IO Platform 2.0.4 release
• Spring AMQP and messaging guru Gary Russell just announced Spring AMQP 1.6.0 RC (and 1.5.6)
• Spring framework ninja Stéphane Nicoll just announced Spring Framework 4.3 RC2, 4.2.6 and 3.2.17 are now available
• not one to sit on his laurels, Stéphane also announced Spring Boot 1.3.5
• This blog has a really nice look at some of the players in the microservice ecosystem…

I can't even believe it's May already! STOP THE WORLD I WANT OFF! Well, at least the times are exciting! There's so much cool stuff to look at this week so let's get to it!

• New sessions are up on the shiny new SpringOne Platform website check it out! In addition to an Adrian Cockcroft keynote, we're got speakers booked from Netflix, Google, Comcast, Express Scripts, Kroger, along with Spring leaders like Juergen Hoeller, Dr. Dave Syer, Rossen Stoyanchev, Oliver Gierke, and of course, yours truly!
• and join Spring Cloud Data Flow leads Mark Fisher and Mark Pollack for a look at Data Driven Microservices with Spring Cloud Data Flow
• Spring Session and Spring Security lead Rob Winch has just announced Spring Session 1.2.0.RC3.
• Spring REST Docs lead …

As we've just shipped the GA release of Spring Data release train Hopper, let's take a deeper look at the changes and features that come with the 13 modules on the train. A very fundamental change in the release train's dependencies is the upgrade to Spring Framework 4.2 (currently 4.2.5) as baseline. This is in preparation for the upcoming 4.3 release of the framework. We also took the chance to upgrade our Querydsl integration to 4.x (currently 4.1) which required some breaking changes in very core abstractions. Besides that, Hopper contains quite a few significant major version changes its…

I am pleased to announce the release of Spring Data Geode 1.0.0.APACHE-GEODE-INCUBATING-M2, offering support for the recently announced Apache Geode 1.0.0-incubating.M2 release.

Spring Data Geode is a specific version of Spring Data GemFire with support for Apache Geode rather than Pivotal GemFire.

Both Spring Data GemFire and Spring Data Geode are based on the same source repository in GitHub, however, Apache Geode support lives in the apache-geode branch. Therefore, you won't find a separate Spring Data project specifically for Apache Geode, but this is of little consequence since your existing knowledge of Pivotal GemFire combined with Spring Data GemFire will be immediately useful and transferable to Apache Geode and Spring Data Geode…

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

Following 1.1.0.M1, it's my pleasure to announce that Spring REST Docs 1.1.0.RC1 has been released and is available from https://repo.spring.io/milestone/.

What's new?

HTTPie request snippet

A new HTTPie request snippet has been introduced. Similar to the existing curl request snippet, the new snippet contains the HTTPie command for a request. My thanks to Raman Gupta who contributed this new feature.

Reusable snippets

Snippets can now be created once with some common configuration and then reused. This reduces repetition when documenting common parts on an API, such as self links.

Relaxed…

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…