It is my pleasure to announce that Spring Framework 4.2.5 is available from repo.spring.io and Maven Central! This fifth maintenance release in the 4.2 line contains 40 fixes and improvements and is a recommended upgrade for all 4.x users, in particular also from 4.1 now.

Our next stop is the first release candidate of Spring Framework 4.3 next month, with many key features (including several core container refinements) available in the snapshots already. Please give a 4.3 snapshot a try and let us know if you encounter any regressions.

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Today we are pleased to announce the general availability of Spring XD 1.3.1 and Flo for Spring XD 1.0.1

• Spring XD 1.3.1 GA: zip, brew and rpm.
• Flo for Spring XD 1.0.1 GA: zip.

Here are some highlights of bug fixes and general improvements. Consult the JIRA release notes for the full list of issues fixed.

• Support for encryption in XD configuration files
• Support for Kafka sync or async producers
• Fix for Embedded Headers Message Converter Buffer Overflow
• Update default redis pool settings to have no limit on number of active connections
• Upgrade to Spring Integration 4.2.5, Spring Framework 4.2.5, Spring AMQP 3.6
…

In preparation of a Spring Boot service release on the horizon, I am pleased to announce the fourth service release of the Spring Data release train Gosling. As usual, service releases contain bugfixes — 45 in total this time —, so that an upgrade is highly recommended.

• Spring Data Commons 1.11.4 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data JPA 1.9.4 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Cassandra 1.3.4 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Solr 1.5.4 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Gemfire 1.7.4 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Neo4j 3.4.4 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data MongoDB 1.8.4 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data KeyValue 1.0.4 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - …

On behalf of the Spring Integration team I’m happy to announce the First Milestone of the Spring Integration 4.3 release.

4.3 is planned to be only a minor release with a few new features and improvements over 4.2 and will close out the 4.x line. Meanwhile we are looking forward to embrace the Reactive Foundation for the JVM in Spring Integration 5.0. We have yet to determine exactly what that means, so stay tuned! In addition, 5.0 (2017) will include the (currently separate) Spring Integration Java DSL.

We plan on finalizing 4.3 over the next few months before switching our attention full-time to 5.0 so, if there is some must have feature you need before next year…

It's my pleasure to announce that the first milestone of Spring REST Docs 1.1 has been released. 1.1.0.M1 is available from https://repo.spring.io/milestone/.

What's new?

REST Assured

As an alternative to the lightweight server-less documentation generation offered by Spring Framework's MockMvc, you can now use REST Assured to test and document your RESTful services. This opens up Spring REST Docs to all four corners of the JVM and beyond, allowing you to document anything that you can access via HTTP.

Markdown

Support has been added for generating Markdown snippets. On its own, Markdown isn't as capable as Asciidoctor, but can work very well when combined with existing documentation toolchains such as Slate…

Entering Reactive Streams Era

Reactor 2.0 development started by the end of 2014, around the same time as Reactive Streams. We were keen on joining the effort and early adopt a backpressure protocol to mitigate our main message-passing limitation: bounded capacity. We delivered in Reactor 2.0 the first attempt to make Reactive Streams implementations of RingBuffer-based schedulers and derived an increasingly popular reactive pattern: Reactive Extensions.

Meanwhile, Reactive Streams started getting traction and an entire ecosystem of libraries discussed this transition. The regular concern ? Implementing Reactive Streams semantics is all but an easy task. We observed an increasing need for a reactive foundation to solve message-passing and implement common streaming operators. We therefore created a dedicated project space for Reactor Core and started a focused effort with Spring Framework team…

On behalf of the Spring Data team I'm happy to announce the first milestone of the Hopper release train. The release ships 250 tickets fixed! The most important new features are:

• Upgrade to Querydsl 4.
• Integration of Spring Data Neo4j 4.1, Spring Data Couchbase 2.1 and Spring Data Solr 2 (on Solr 5).
• Support for Redis Cluster.
• Support for projections on repository query methods in JPA and MongoDB (see the example for details).
• Addition of Spring Data Envers to the release train (previously maintained separately).

Find a curated changelog in our release train wiki or skim through a full list of changes in JIRA. We're shooting for a release candidate early March and a GA release at the…

On behalf of the community, I'm pleased to announce the release of Spring Session 1.1.0.RC1. The release can be found in the Spring Milestone Repository (https://repo.spring.io/milestone/).

This release contains lots of fixes and new features. You can find details in the What's New in 1.1 The highlights of 1.1.0.RC1 have been included below:

• Support for GemFire Thanks to John Blum!
• Allow writing to Redis immediately (instead of lazily) using redisFlushMode

We look forward to your feedback and if all goes well plan to release 1.1.0.RELEASE in the next few weeks.

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On behalf of the team, I am pleased to announce the release of Spring Cloud Stream 1.0.0.M4. The new release comes with a few major changes and enhancements, and it defines core abstractions and primitives that we believe to be essential for the development of distributed real-time data processing applications. To name some of them:

Default publish-subscribe semantics

The most important change in Spring Cloud Stream 1.0.0.M4 is the way in which applications interact with each other. We have opted for a default publish-subscribe model, in which each application that receives messages from a given destination will receive a copy of the message. This is a better fit for the processing model of stream applications, where intermediate topics act as data hubs for the various intersecting data streams, also making scenarios such as tapping easier and more efficient. This feature goes hand in hand with the next, which is consumer groups…