Hi Spring fans! And welcome to another, very special installment of This Week in Spring where we look not only at the last week's news but also the highlights of the year behind us. 2018 was one of incredible turmult on the technology landscape, one that the Spring community has been able to deftly navigate. In this special year-end wrapup we'll do what we always do - look at the latest and greatest in the ecosystem, but we'll also revisit the things that I, your friendly neighborhood @starbuxman, feel most positively impacted the Spring developer in 2018.

First, of course, let me get the…

It is my pleasure to announce Spring Session for Apache Geode and Pivotal GemFire (SSDG), 2.1.2.RELEASE (official project site).

In addition to several new features and improvements that follow, SSDG 2.1.2.RELEASE builds on:

• Spring Framework 5.1.3.RELEASE.

• Spring Data for Apache Geode & Pivotal GemFire Lovelace-SR3.

• Spring Session 2.1.2.RELEASE.

These bits will be picked up in Spring Boot 2.1.2.RELEASE and are available in Maven Central now.

You can easily switch from Apache Geode to Pivotal GemFire simply by changing your application dependency from

org.springframework.session:spring…

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 3.9.7 maintenance release of the Spring Tool Suite 3.

Highlights from this update release include:

• updated to Eclipse 2018-12 release
• added support for Buildship 3
• added full-blown embedded properties editor for boot launch configs
• boot dashboard now shows live request mappings and beans for reactive web boot apps, too
• various bug fixes

To download the distributions, please go visit:

• Spring Tool Suite 3: https://spring.io/tools3/sts/all
• Detailed new and noteworthy notes can be found here: STS 3.9.7 New & Noteworthy.

Enjoy!

On behalf of the community, I am pleased to announce that the Release Candidate 2 (RC2) of the Spring Cloud Greenwich Release Train is available today. The release can be found in Spring Milestone repository. You can check out the Greenwich release notes for more information.

Notable Changes in the Greenwich Release Train

For a complete list of issues in this release across all projects see the project page on GitHub.

Spring Cloud Contract

• Added support for binary payloads (GH-818)

Spring Cloud Security

• Spring Cloud Gateway Filter added to support OAuth2 (GH-141). A sample application demonstrating its use is available here.
…

NOTE: This is a guest post from our friends at Alibaba.

Hello everyone! Today, we’re very excited to announce that the 0.2.1.RELEASE of Spring Cloud Alibaba is available now.

Release highlights:

• Added two new modules to Spring Cloud Alibaba: spring-cloud-alibaba-schedulerx and spring-cloud-stream-binder-rocketmq.
• Added some new features in spring-cloud-alibaba-nacos and spring-cloud-alibaba-sentinel.
• Fixed some bugs in the previous version.

Notes:

• The Spring Cloud Alibaba project is a community project maintained by Alibaba.

• The 0.2.1.RELEASE is compatible with Spring Cloud Finchley. Also included in this version is a 0.1.1.RELEASE, which is compatible with Spring Cloud Edgware. 0.1.1.RELEASE also contains the components and features that are new in 0.2.1.

…

The Spring Cloud Data Flow team is pleased to announce the release of 2.0 M1 Follow the Getting Started guides for running on Local, Cloud Foundry, and Kubernetes.

Hand in hand is the 2.0 M1 release of Spring Cloud Skipper which has been updated to depend upon Spring Boot 2.1. The getting started section in the reference guide is the best place to start kicking the tires.

Here are the highlights for Data Flow

• Stream deployment always delegates to Skipper

• Single server that runs on all supported platforms

• Update to Boot 2.1

• Standardize on OAuth2 and OpenID Connect for Security

• Update internals to use JPA

• UI improvements

• Task/Job Execution and Performance improvements

…

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 4.1.0 release of the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Atom.

Highlights from this release include:

• (Eclipse) updated to Eclipse 2018-12 release
• (Eclipse) live hovers now combine JavaDoc and live information from running boot apps
• (Eclipse) boot dashboard now shows live request mappings and beans for reactive web boot apps, too
• (Spring Boot) initial content-assist support for Spring Data repository definitions
• (CF Manifest) added support for new buildpacks attribute
• various bug fixes

To download the distribution for Eclipse…

We're please to announce the release of Spring Cloud Open Service Broker 2.1.0. This release supports additions and changes in the Open Service Broker API v2.14. This release includes:

• Upgrade to Spring Boot 2.0.7.RELEASE
• Support for asynchronous service instance binding and unbinding
• Support providing an updated dashboard_url when updating a service instance
• Resolves issues with deserializing the model objects that were converted to the builder pattern
• Adds a convenience property to the various request objects for accessing the Plan for the specified ServiceDefinition

Include the following…

We're please to announce the release of Spring Cloud Open Service Broker 3.0.0.M3. This 3.0 release will support Spring WebFlux and a reactive programing model, as well as additions and changes in the Open Service Broker API v2.14. This release includes:

• Upgrade to Spring Boot 2.1.1.RELEASE (previously built against Spring Boot 2.0)
• Adds a convenience property to the various request objects for accessing the Plan for the specified ServiceDefinition

Include the following Spring Boot starter:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-open…