Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week, I'm in Chicago, IL, for the spectacular GOTO conference, Chicago edition. If you're in the Chicago area, ping me on Twitter (@starbuxman). Cloud Foundry Summit just wrapped today as 1500 people came together to talk about the community and the technology. Spring made a strong showing, even getting a general session shoutout from James Watters for Spring Boot passing 1 Million downloads in April.

Now, without further ado..

• Spring Tool Suite ninja Kris De Volder just announced the new support for editing .yml files in STS - this is particularly awesome if you're using Spring Boot!
• Spring IO lead and all-around mad-scientist Andy Wilkinson just released the Gradle dependency management plugin 0.5.1.RELEASE. This plugin brings the power of Maven's dependencyManagement mechanism to Gradle and makes it easy to create consistent builds.
• Spring Integration lead Gary Russell just released Spring AMQP 1.4.5 and 1.5.0-M1. The 1.5 series introduces class-level @RabbitListener annotations (not just method-level ones), auto-declared queues and bindings, configurable exchange/routing Key for replies, a RabbitManagementTemplate…

"You are always a student, never a master. You have to keep moving forward." -Conrad Hall

"The empires of the future are the empires of the mind." -Winston Churchill

"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose." -Dr. Seuss

"Good students are good at all things." -Marissa Mayer

"The person who never made a mistake never tried anything new." -Albert Einstein

Warning: if you're a seasoned developer, than this may not be the post you're looking for. Keep reading, anyway. I'll bet you know some developers who are taking their first…

In STS 3.6.4 we introduced ".properties" editor support, for editing Spring Boot configuration properties.

Soon thereafter, people started asking about support for ".yml" files as well. We are proud to say that the ".yml" support is now reality.

Check out the 5 minute video demo to see this in action:

The Spring Boot Yaml editor is built on top of YEdit. STS adds boot-specific content-assist, validation, hover-infos and hyperlink detectors.

It can be tried out today from STS's nightly update site and is planned to be released as part of STS 3.7.0 near the end of June 2015.

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Las Vegas at the mega EMC World event.

• Spring Security lead Rob Winch has just announced that Spring Security SAML 1.0.1 is now available
• Phillip Verheyden's talk offers a very pragmatic look athow to move Spring 3 application - including dependencies like Jackson and Hibernate - to take advantage of newer and new features in Spring 4.x.
• My pal Adib Saikali's SpringOne2GX 2014 talk on building a rich client backends with Spring is now up
• Don't miss this replay of Spring ninja Greg Turnquist's talk on debugging and maintaining Spring Boot applications
• Dustin Whittle's talk on how to performance testing (Spring) applications is filled with useful tools, tips-and-tricks for…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week, I'm in Barcelona, Spain for the Spring I/O conference.

• Spring Social lead Craig Walls just announced the release of Spring Social Facebook 2.0.1, the first maintenance release in the Spring Social Facebook 2.0 line.
• the good Dr. Syer just published a blog on different ways to bind services in Cloud Foundry
• Spring Security lead Rob Winch just released Spring Security 4.0.1, the first maintenance release in the Spring Security 4.0 line
• This Week's SpringOne2GX Replays are out! Marius Bogoevici shows us how to Build highly modular and testable business systems with Spring Integration, Brian Cavalier talks about Efficient Client-Server Communication with Differential Synchronization and JSON Patch and Topher Bullock and Will Tran review Server-side JavaScript with Nashorn and Spring…

In this article we look at how to bind a Spring Boot application to data services (JDBC, NoSQL, messaging etc.) and the various sources of default and automatic behaviour in Cloud Foundry, providing some guidance about which ones to use and which ones will be active under what conditions. Spring Boot provides a lot of autoconfiguration and external binding features, some of which are relevant to Cloud Foundry, and many of which are not. Spring Cloud Connectors is a library that you can use in your application if you want to create your own components programmatically, but it doesn't do…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Bangalore, India, at the Great Indian Developer Summit. Lots of the Spring Team are at JAXConf in Germany this week as well.

A friendly reminder, if you're in the south west region of Europe, and Barcelona, Spain, specifically, and looking for fun in the sun, I can think of no better option than Spring I/O Conference, which is next week. Don't miss the many great talks from many amazing Spring team and Spring community members. I'll be there and looking forward to meeting and seeing you all!

Without further ado, let's get…

Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2014.

Speaker: Ryan Gardner, Dealer.com

Core Spring Track

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/SpringCentral/zookeeper-config2014-2c-41123708

Application configuration is an evolution. It starts as a hard-coded strings in your application and hopefully progresses to something external, such as a file or system property that can be changed without deployment. But what happens when other enterprise concerns enter the mix, such as audit requirements or access control around who can make changes? How do you maintain the consistency of values across too many application servers to manage at one time from a terminal window? The next step in the application configuration evolution is centralized configuration that can be accessed by your applications as they move through your various environments on their way to production. Such a service transfers the ownership of configuration from the last developer who touched the code to a well-versed application owner who is responsible for the configuration of the application across all environments. At Dealer.com, we have created one such solution that relies on Apache ZooKeeper to handle the storage and coordination of the configuration data and Spring to handle to the retrieval, creation and registration of configured objects in each application. The end result is a transparent framework that provides the same configured objects that could have been created using a Spring configuration, configuration file and property value wiring. This talk will cover both the why and how of our solution, with a focus on how we leveraged the powerful attributes of both Apache ZooKeeper and Spring to rid our application of local configuration files and provide a consistent mechanism for application configuration in our enterprise.

Applications generated more and more data than ever before and a huge part of the challenge - before it can even be analyzed - is accommodating the load in the first place. Apache's Kafka meets this challenge. It was originally designed by LinkedIn and subsequently open-sourced in 2011. The project aims to provide a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds. The design is heavily influenced by transaction logs. It is a messaging system, similar to traditional messaging systems like RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, MQSeries, but it's ideal for log aggregation…