On behalf of the Reactor team, it is my pleasure to announce that Reactor hit an important milestone last week, making the Bismuth-M1 release train available.

This first milestone backs the newly released Spring Framework 5 RC1. It notably includes version 3.1.0.M1 of reactor-core, reactor-test and reactor-extra.

As the 3.1.x generation is slated to be the long term support branch (as is appropriate for a version that backs the Spring framework), focus has been on stabilizing and polishing the API. As such, expect some breaking changes from the 3.0.x versions [1].

Migrating from 3.0.x

If you’ve kept your Reactor dependencies up to date during the 3.0.x phase (meaning you’re on reactor-core 3.0.7…

On behalf of the team and everyone that contributed, I am pleased to announce that the first milestone of Spring Boot 2 has been released and is available from our milestone repository. This release closes over 300 issues and pull requests!

This first milestone builds on and requires Spring Framework 5.0.RC1. There are a number of nice refinements in Spring Framework 5 including extensive support for building reactive applications.

Highlights of this first milestone include:

• A complete rewrite of the Gradle plugin (including a dedicated guide)
• Support of reactive web applications development using WebFlux or WebFlux.fn: dedicated spring-boot-starter-webflux starter using Netty by default, support for @WebFluxTest for testing your reactive controller and reactive data support for MongoDB, Redis and Cassandra
• Major dependencies upgrade across the portfolio: Spring Data Kay M3, Spring Security 5.0 M1, Spring Integration 5.0 M4, Spring AMQP 2.0 M4, Spring Session 2.0 M1 and Spring Batch 4.0 M2
• Relaxed binding has been improved
…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I am in Munich for the Spring Meetup; Berlin for OSDC; Krakow for Geecon; Barcelona for Spring I/O, and Eindhoven for NextBuild. If you're around, say hi.

As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it!

• Dr. Mark Pollack just announced Spring Cloud Data Flow 1.2GA!, including the server editions for local, Kubernetes, YARN and Cloud Foundry. This new release is packed with good stuff. I particularly like the support for composed tasks, which lets me orchestrate a flow of tasks as a cohesive unit-of-work. This is ideal for…

On behalf of the team, I am pleased to announce the general availability of Spring Cloud Data Flow 1.2 across a range of platforms

Here are the relevant links to documentation and getting started guides.

• Local: Quick Start, Getting Started Guide

• Cloud Foundry: Getting Started Guide

• YARN: Getting Started Guide

• Kubernetes: Getting Started Guide

Highlights of the 1.2 release:

Composed Tasks

This release introduces Composed Tasks ! This feature provides the ability to orchestrate a flow of tasks as a cohesive unit-of-work. A complex ETL pipeline may include executions in sequence, parallel, conditional transitions, or a combination of all of the above. The composed task feature comes with DSL primitives and an interactive graphical interface to quickly build these type of topologies more easily. You can read more about it from the reference guide…

We are pleased to announce that Spring Batch 4.0.0.M2 is now available via Github and the Pivotal download repository. This release represents the second milestone for the Spring Batch 4.0 release. Many thanks to all that contributed to this release.

What's new?

This milestone continues the work laid out in Spring Batch 4.0.0.M1. Specific updates include:

• Dependency updates
• Continued java configuration improvements

Dependency updates

Spring Batch 4 will be the version included in Spring Boot 2 so we're taking this time to syncronize our dependencies. With that, this release supports upgrades to the latest milestones of the Spring Data Kay release train and Spring Integration 5…

It's my pleasure to announce that Spring REST Docs 1.2.1.RELEASE is available from Maven Central, JCenter, and our release repository. My thanks to everyone who contributed to this release by reporting bugs and opening pull requests.

This maintenance release includes a handful of bug fixes and documentation improvements. It is a recommend upgrade for all Spring REST Docs users.

GitHub | Issues | Documentation | Twitter | Gitter | Stack Overflow

On behalf of the community, I'm pleased to announce the release of Spring Security 5.0.0 M1. This release includes bug fixes, new features, and is based off of Spring Framework 5.0.0 RC1. The highlights of the release include:

• Initial Support for Reactive Web Applications
• New Support for OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect 1.0

Initial Support for Reactive Web Applications

Following one of the primary themes of Spring Framework 5.0, Spring Security 5.0 will add support for Reactive applications by building on top of Spring's reactive support. The first milestone focused on getting primary…

On behalf of the community I’m pleased to announce the release of Spring Session 2.0.0.M1. This release is focused primarily on ensuring compatability with Spring Framework 5 which is the minimum Spring version required.

Supported Data Stores

We have also removed some of the Spring Session implementations from the main repository. The goal is to allow the core Spring Session team to focus on delivering new features rather than needing to know the ins and outs of every data store. This will allow development of other modules to be done without the overhead of reviews from the Spring Session…

Introduction

It has been almost 10 years now since I taught my first Core Spring class. At that time almost everything was XML and configuring JPA or Spring Security, for example, could be a lot of hard work. Spring has matured a great deal in the meantime with component-scanning, Java Configuration and Spring Boot making it much more fun to use. And the number of Spring Projects has increased considerably.

Pivotal Training continues to enhance our Spring curriculum and introduce new courses - including Spring Boot Developer and Spring Cloud Services. I have provided an overview of these…