Spring Boot v1.4.0.M2 is available now from the Spring milestone repository. This is an absolutely massive release, closing over 180 issues and pull requests! Thanks to everyone that has contributed.

Highlights of the new release include:

• ASCII Art banners generated from image files (gif,jpg or png).
• Easier JsonSerializer and JsonDeserializer registration with @JsonComponent.
• Couchbase support.
• Neo4J support
• Narayana transaction manager support.
• Upgrades to Spring Framework 4.3, Hibernate 5.1, Jackson 2.7, Solr 5.5, Spring Data Hopper, Spring Session 1.2 & Hazelcast 3.6.
• A massive overhaul of testing support including a new unified @SpringBootTest annotation, @MockBean and @SpyBean support, JSON AssertJ support and auto-configuration for tests.
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I am pleased to announce that the spring-kafka (Spring for Apache Kafka) Second Milestone for version 1.0 is now available.

The artifacts org.springframework.kafka:spring-kafka:1.0.0.M2 and org.springframework.kafka:spring-kafka-test:1.0.0.M2 are available in the Milestone repository.

Changes since the First Milestone include:

• KafkaTemplate.send() methods now return ListenableFuture<SendResult<K, V>>

to track publishing to the Kafka topic asynchronously.

• The MessagingMessageListenerAdapter (for @KafkaListener method) can now infer the type for payload conversion from the method arguments.
• A StringJsonMessageConverter, which can use the type inference to build the target object from JSON content using the Jackson ObjectMapper.
• RECEIVED_ headers have been added from the Listener to avoid clashing (re-routing) to the same topic with the same messageKey when sending, e.g. with the Spring Integration Adapters.
• More testing utilities.
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I am pleased to announce that the spring-integration-kafka (Spring Integration Kafka Support) First Milestone for version 2.0 is now available.

The Spring Integration Kafka extension project provides inbound and outbound channel adapters for Apache Kafka.

Starting with this version 2.0 the project is a complete rewrite based on the new spring-kafka project which uses the pure java Producer and Consumer clients provided by Kafka 0.9.x.x.

The artifact org.springframework.integration:spring-integration-kafka:2.0.0.M1 is available in the Milestone repository.

Key Features

The Kafka Consumer…

On behalf of the entire Spring Data team I am happy to announce the general availability of the Spring Data release train Hopper. The train includes 395 tickets fixed and its most important additions are:

• Upgrade of the Spring Framework baseline to 4.2 (4.2.5 in particular).
• Support for Query by Example in Spring Data JPA and MongoDB.
• Improved support for composed annotations.
• Support for lookup types and nested associations in Spring Data REST
• Major upgrades of the Solr (2.0 on Solr 5.5), Neo4j (4.1), Couchbase (2.1 on Couchbase 2.0), Elasticsearch (2.0 on ES 2.2)
• Upgrade to Querydsl 4.
• Support for object mapping and repositories for Spring Data Redis.
• Support for Redis Cluster.
• Support for projections on repository query methods in JPA and MongoDB.
• …

On behalf of the community, I'm pleased to announce the release of Spring Session 1.2.0.RC2. 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:

• A number of fixes for the JDBC support have been included
• A new Grails 3 Sample

See What's New in 1.2 for more details.

Our Community Support

As always, I'd like to thank our awesome community for their contributions. A very big thanks to those who submitted Pull Requests:

• #436 - Use Flapdoodle Embedded MongoDB for integration tests Thanks Vedran Pavić
• #437 - Externalize H2 database dependency version Thanks Vedran Pavić
• #440 - Fix SessionRepositoryFilter comment typo Thanks Jin Zhang
• #442 - Add Grails 3 Sample Thanks Eric Helgeson
• #444 - Add Dispatcher types to web.xml Thanks moonlight
• #450 - Fix loading of JdbcSession's lastAccessedTime attribute Thanks Vedran Pavić
• #451 - Polish JdbcHttpSessionConfigurationTests Thanks Vedran Pavić
• #454 - Add JDBC Spring Boot sample Thanks Vedran Pavić
• #462 - Update WebSocket sample to use H2 console auto-configuration Thanks …

On behalf of the team, I am pleased to announce the release of Spring Cloud Stream 1.0.0.RC2, available here. As part of the release candidate cycle, it comes with a number of bug fixes and a small number adjustments. The complete list of changes is available here.

Some highlights:

• Spring Cloud Stream applications now use the ObjectMapper provided by Spring Boot, if available;
• Header embedding is now a general purpose producer/consumer property. It can be enabled or disabled by middlewares that require embedding for header propagation. This allows easier interoperability outside Spring Cloud Stream; (until now it was a Kafka-specific property);
• Further documentation and sample improvements.
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Dear Spring community,

It is my pleasure to announce that a feature-complete Spring Framework 4.3 release candidate is available now! This is a perfect opportunity for you to get involved: Please run your regression tests against it, and of course, feel free to try the new features...

Dependency injection refinements:

* @Autowired injection of Map/Collection beans and self references * @Autowired on configuration class constructors (finally!) * No need for declaring @Autowired on a unique non-default constructor * ObjectProvider as a richer variant of an ObjectFactory handle * InjectionPoint/DependencyDescriptor as an injectable argument for @Bean methods

MVC processing refinements:

* Default processing of OPTIONS, HEAD, Allow and If-Unmodified-Since * Support for custom HTTP Vary configuration and HTTP Range on custom resources * Precomposed @GetMapping, @PostMapping, @RequestScope, @SessionScope etc * @RequestAttribute and @SessionAttribute as handler method arguments * Full support for Jackson 2.7's new type resolution algorithm

Various infrastructural refinements across the framework:

* Wider support for composed annotations and for placeholders/expressions in attributes * Richer programmatic metadata in core container exceptions * Component scanning in manifest-defined classpath entries * A background initialization option for bootstrapping JPA / Hibernate * A 'sync' flag on @Cacheable and support for the Caffeine cache provider

We are working towards an RC2 with some remaining fine-tuning and performance improvements in the meantime, preparing for 4.3's general availability on June 1st!

Cheers, Juergen

I’m pleased to announce the release of Spring LDAP 2.1.0.RC1. The highlights of this release include:

• #380 - Support for Spring Data Hopper
• #384 - Early support for Spring IO Platform 2.1
• #351 - Support for commons-pool2
• #370 - Support property placeholders in XML Namespace
• #392 - Document Testing Support
• Migrated from JIRA to GitHub Issues
• Added Gitter Chat

For complete details of 2.1 refer to the changelog

Contributions

Without the community we couldn't be the successful project we are today. I'd like to thank everyone that created issues & provided feedback. A special thanks to the…

We are pleased to announce the second milestone of Spring AMQP 1.6 is available.

Additions since the first milestone include:

• The caching connection factory now exposes cache statistics

• @RabbitListener methods now communicate type information to the message converter for inbound messages. This means, for example, the Jackson2JsonMessageConverter no longer needs a custom class mapper when a message without type information in the headers is received (e.g. from a sender that is not a Spring AMQP app). Instead, the @RabbitListener method parameter type is used in the conversion. In addition, the Method and bean are also made available via message properties to custom converters.

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