Hi, Spring fans! In this installment, Josh Long (@starbuxman) talks to industry analyst, fascinating person, strategist, and storyteller Michael Coté (@cote).

Aloha, my friends, from Hawai'i, where I'm currently on vacation! And, because I'm on vacation, I'll cut to the chase: there's a lot of great stuff to get to this week (surprise!)

But first, a friendly turtle I met the other day:

You're welcome. Now then, where were we? Oh right!

• In last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast, I talk about visualizing software architecture with the C4 model with architect Simon Brown. Don't miss this one!
• Spring Tips: Some cool features possible with Spring Integration 5.5
• Have you checked out the speakers in this year's SpringOne, on September 1st to 2nd, 2021? I'll be there and so will many amazing others!
• Spring Data 2021.0.3 and 2020.0.11 released
• Spring Data 2021.1.0-M1 released
• Spring Framework 5.3.9 and 5.2.16 available now
• I love this blog looking at Spring GraphQL Milestone One
• Spring Security 5.6.0-M1 released
• The State of Spring Survey is back…

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment, I talk to author, prolific public speaker, an architect's architect, and one of the most interesting people I get to bump into, and learn from, in this wacky, wild, and wonderful ecosystem of ours: Simon Brown (@simonbrown).

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment, I look at some key features made possible by the new Spring Integration 5.5 release, including the new Spring .zip archive support and the new Spring Native hints supporting GraalVM native images

Hi, Spring fans! How're you doing? I'm heads-down, hurriedly making final preparations for tomorrow's SpringOne Tour episode installment. This is going to be SO MUCH FUN. Do NOT miss this show tomorrow morning, 10AM California time. I'll be there, along with my friends Madhura Bhave, Olga Maciaszek-Sharma, Bella Bai, Whitney Lee, Core Iberkleid, Nate Schutta, and special guest star Angie Jones.

We look forward to seeing you there and we'll explore the wide and wonderful world of continuous delivery, testing and more together.

• JOOQ 3.15.0 Release is out, and includes support for R2DBC (and much more)
• Neat! The JRE will be UTF-8 by default instead of dangerously assuming the host operating system's default: openjdk/jdk
• A Bootiful Podcast: Matt Raible Last week, I talked to Matt Raible, and you can too! I love that guy. So happy he was able to join the show again.
• Spring Tips: Spring Cloud Square
• This is neat: you can run TestNG tests with JUnit 5 now
• Piotr Mińkowski on Twitter: JPAstreamer is a library for expressing JPA/Hibernate queries as Java streams. It can be also integrated with Spring.
• Apress' R2DBC Revealed…

It's Matt Raible! I love talking to Matt Raible, and I'll bet you would too. He's one of the good ones, people. One of the legends of the Java and JavaScript communities. One of the greats. Enjoy!

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment, Spring Developer Advocate Josh Long (@starbuxman) looks at how to build smarter HTTP clients for your Spring Boot microservices with Spring Cloud Square, Retrofit, and OKHTTP.

Guest Author: Andi Marek, GraphQL Java founder

I am very happy to announce the creation of the Spring GraphQL project and the availability of an initial milestone towards a 1.0 release. The project integrates GraphQL Java and Spring and was developed in collaboration between both teams.

Today is GraphQL Java's 6th birthday! One fundamental decision I made from the start was to leave any HTTP and IO aspects as a separate concern. GraphQL Java has always been "just" an engine to execute GraphQL requests. The decision has paid off but the obvious downside is the need to create your own HTTP…

Following the Spring GraphQL project announcement and the availability of a 1.0 milestone, this blog post aims to provide more details.

Introduction

If you're looking to get started, please head over to our reference documentation and read the "Boot Starter" section, or run the samples.

If you don't know much about GraphQL, there are plenty of good resources. You can start at graphql.org/learn.

GraphQL is widely adopted and in "Early Majority" based on the InfoQ Architecture Trends for 2020. It provides an alternative to REST APIs that is more focused on data, and provides a schema and a query language for clients to use. The appeal from a client perspective is clear in this State of JavaScript report. You can read GitHub's story…