Hi Spring fans! This week I'm in Austin, Texas for OSCON; London, UK, for Devoxx UK; and Nice, France for RivieraDev! If you're around, I'd love to talk to you so don't hesitate to say hi!

• Spring Framework 5 RC1 is now available!
• InfoQ has a nice post on the new Spring Vault release
• Spring Integration lead Gary Russell just announced Spring AMQP 2.0M4 is now available
• Spring Cloud ninja Ryan Baxter just announced Spring Cloud Camden SR7 has been released
• I liked this short-but-sweet look at the Pivotal Cloud Cache on Pivotal Cloud Foundry, in terms of a Spring Boot application
• Periodic reminder: Spring Cloud Contract helps you solve the problem of integration testing distributed systems- don't sleep on this!
• Spring ninja Stéphane Nicoll‏ announced that there is now a starter for Reactive Redis support…

I am pleased to announce that the fourth milestone of Spring AMQP 2.0 2.0.0.M4 is now available in the Spring milestone repository.

Features since the last milestone include…​

• The new DirectMessageListenerContainer now supports configuring the number of messages to process between acks.

• You can now specify container concurrency on the @RabbitListener annotation.

The release candidate is expected to be released in early June with the GA shortly after the Spring Framework 5.0 GA release.

For a complete list of changes in 2.0, see What’s New in the reference manual; also see the release notes for 2.0.0.M1, 2.0.0.M2, 2.0.0.M3, as well as 2.0.0.M4…

On behalf of the team, I am pleased to announce that Service Release 7 of the Spring Cloud Camden Release Train is available today. The release can be found in our Spring Release repository and Maven Central. The documentation can be found here. The release notes can be found here.

The following modules were updated as part of Camden.SR7:

• Spring Cloud Commons 1.1.9.RELEASE
• Spring Cloud Netflix 1.2.7.RELEASE
• Spring Cloud AWS 1.1.4.RELEASE
• Spring Cloud Consul 1.1.4.RELEASE Dependency Fixes
• Spring Cloud Security 1.1.4.RELEASE Documentation Fixes
• Spring Cloud Sleuth 1.1.4.RELEASE
• Spring Cloud Stream Brooklyn.SR3 fixes issues with Spring Cloud Bus, Hystrix, and Turbine. See this issue for more information.
• Spring Cloud Contract 1.0.5.RELEASE
…

Dear Spring community,

It is my pleasure to announce that a feature-complete Spring Framework 5.0 release candidate is available now! We are expecting a further release candidate at the end of May and a final release in late June at this point.

As a major revision of the core framework, 5.0 RC1 comes with a Java 8+ baseline and many infrastructure refinements: e.g. our own Commons Logging bridge autodetecting Log4j 2, SLF4J, JUL by default; streamlined use of Servlet 3.1+; and early support for JUnit 5.0 M4.

Once again, here are the major Spring Framework 5 feature themes:

• Reactive programming: introducing our Spring WebFlux framework built on Reactor 3.1, with support for RxJava 1.3 & 2.1 and running on Tomcat, Jetty, Netty or Undertow.
• Functional style with Java 8 & Kotlin: several API refinements and Kotlin extensions across the framework, in particular for bean registration and functional web endpoints.
• Integration with Java EE 8 APIs: support for Servlet 4.0, Bean Validation 2.0, JPA 2.2, as well as the JSON Binding API (as an alternative to Jackson/Gson in Spring MVC).
• Ready for JDK 9:…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Perth, Australia, for the amazing YOW! West conference, talking to developers about building cloud native Java applications. If you're around, say hi. As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it!

I'm super excited about our first Spring Days event, on May 30-31, in Chicago. I'll be there along with other Spring gurus like Eddu Melendez, Anupama Pradhan, and Michael Minella. I hope you'll join us!

• Spring IO lead Any Wilkinson has announced Spring IO Platform Athens-SR5. He also announced Spring IO Platform Brussels-SR2
• Spring Session lead Rob Winch just announced Spring Session 1.3.1
• Spring Integration lead and all around great human Gary Russell just announced Spring for Apache Kafka 2.0M1
• Spring Cloud ninja Glenn Renfro just announced Spring Cloud Task 1.2.0
• I loved (in case you were unclear about the sentiment I have for this post!) this look at real time sentiment analysis with TensorFlow and Spring Cloud Data Flow
• the results of this months' ZeroTurnaround web framework report are not too surprising: Spring MVC is in a distant lead, then JSF and GWT, then Spring Boot…

I am pleased to announce that Spring IO Platform Brussels-SR2 is now available from both repo.spring.io and Maven Central.

This maintenance release upgrades the versions of a number of the projects in the Platform:

• AspectJ 1.8.10
• Spring AMQP 1.7.2
• Spring Boot 1.5.3
• Spring Data Ingalls SR 3
• Spring Framework 4.3.8
• Spring Integration 4.3.9
• Spring Kafka 1.1.4

The versions of a number of third-party dependencies have also been updated.

Project Page | GitHub | Issues | Documentation

I am pleased to announce that Spring IO Platform Athens-SR5 is now available from both repo.spring.io and Maven Central.

This maintenance release upgrades the versions of a number of the projects in the Platform:

• AspectJ 1.8.10
• Spring AMQP 1.6.9
• Spring Boot 1.4.6
• Spring Data Hopper SR 10
• Spring Framework 4.3.8
• Spring Integration 4.3.9

The versions of a number of third-party dependencies have also been updated.

Project Page | GitHub | Issues | Documentation

On behalf of the community, I'm pleased to announce the release of Spring Session 1.3.1.RELEASE. This release contains numerous bug fixes. A special thanks to Vedran Pavić and John Blum for all their hard work!

Some of the highlights include:

• #756 - Usage of Spring Data Redis 1.7.1 which has critical bug
• #757 - Restore proper behavior of HttpSession created events in GemFire
• #755 - Improve GemFire SessionRepository, (HTTP) Session copy logic

Project Site | Reference | Help

We are very pleased to announce the availability of the first milestone of the Spring for Apache Kafka 2.0 release 2.0.0.M1.

Significant new features in the 2.0 line include:

• Support for timestamps in the KafkaTemplate.

• Seek to beginning/end of topics.

• New threading model facilitated by KIP-62 - now that the consumer client does not rely on poll() being called frequently, the threading model is much simpler; avoiding the need for internal pause() / resume() processing. Listeners are now always invoked on the consumer thread. This, in turn, has facilitated:

• ConsumerAwareMessageListener (and BatchConsumerAwareMessageListener) are provided so that listener implementations can access the Consumer<?, ?> object to perform operations such as pause(), resume(), metrics() etc.

  …