Hi Spring fans and welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in San Francisco for the first, and sure-to-be-amazing, Kotlin Conf 2017. I'll be talking about Spring Boot and Kotlin, and I hope you'll join me if you're around.

We've got a lot to cover this week so let's get to it!

• Spring Batch lead Michael Minella just announced Spring Batch 4.0.0.M5 which includes, among other things, an ItemProcessor implementation that supports Java 8 Function implementations, updated documentation and much more.
• Spring Framework lead Juergen Hoeller announced Spring Framework 5.0.1 which includes a few bug fixes which in turn pick up fixes in Reactor Netty and welcome performance improvements in AspectJ 1.8.12.
• Last week, in another installment of Spring Tips, I looked at HTTP based contracts with Spring Cloud Contract.
• Spring Cloud co-founder Spencer Gibb announced the first release candidate to Spring Cloud Edgware. There are some changes to not in the artifact names for various starters. Spring Cloud Edgware has a lot of new features…

On behalf of the team, I am pleased to announce the release of Spring Cloud Skipper 1.0 M1.

Skipper is a lightweight tool that allows you to discover Spring Boot applications and manage their lifecycle on multiple Cloud Platforms. You can use Skipper standalone or integrate it with Continuous Integration pipelines to help implement the practice of Continuous Deployment.

The main features in Skipper 1.0 M1 are:

• Define multiple platform accounts where Spring Boot applications can be deployed. Supported platforms are Local, Cloud Foundry, and Kubernetes.
• Substitute variables in Mustache templated files that describe how to deploy applications to a platform.
• Search Package Repositories for existing applications.
• Upgrade/Rollback a package based on a simple blue/green workflow.
• Store the history of resolved template files (aka 'application manifests') which represent the final description of what has been deployed to a platform for a specific release.
• Use via a standalone interactive shell or web API.
…

Greetings Spring community,

Spring Web Services has released 3.0.0 for general availability as well as released a minor patch, 2.4.2.RELEASE.

As stated in the previous blog post, the 2.x series will be maintained as long as Spring Framework 4.x is supported, yet any new work will be conducted on the master branch.

The links below include related tickets.

2.4.2 Release Notes | 2.4.2 Documentation.

3.0.0.RELEASE Release Notes | 3.0.0.RELEASE Documentation.

• 3.0.0.RELEASE:

  • Better handling of large attachments to avoid OutOfMemory exceptions.

  • Wss4jSecurityInterceptor enhancements including SAML callbacks

  • SpringSecurityPasswordValidationCallbackHandler improvement to avoid NPE from lack of a logged-in user

  • Fixes to SOAP 1.1/SOAP 1.2 message header handling

  • Fix content-type for Axiom SOAP 1.2

  • Upgrade to latest versions of AspectJ

  • Support for up-and-coming Axiom 1.3 (community contributor who wants to ensure Spring WS and Axiom 1.3 work together).

• 2.4.2.RELEASE:

  • Backporting of the same SpringSecurityPasswordValidationCallbackHandler fix

  • Accidentally moved wss4j 2.x version too far forward to ensure stable compatibility. If you wish to use the very latest wss4j, you must move to the 3.0 version.

  …

On behalf of everyone who contributed, it's my pleasure to announce that Spring REST Docs 2.0.0.RC1 has been released and is available from https://repo.spring.io/milestone/.

What's new?

Spring REST Docs 2.0 is the latest generation of the project and requires Spring Framework 5.0 and Java 8.

The main highlight of the 2.0 release is support for using Spring WebFlux's WebTestClient to document an API. WebTestClient can be used for lightweight testing and documentation of APIs implemented using WebFlux Fn and WebFlux's annotation-based programming model. It can also be used to document any API…

A shipment of fixes and goodies has arrived and it is brought to you by the new Bismuth-SR3 Bill Of Material. This version is now used by Spring Framework 5.0.1 ! Our site projectreactor.io reflects those latest updates.

Reactor-Core 3.1.1

release notes

A quality update including more than 20 fixes and just a couple new features: Kotlin extensions for Reactor conversion from Publisher and the Flux#limitRequest operator alternative to Flux#take with an explicit upper limit to the produced demand.

We are now working on 3.1.2.RELEASE. Have a look at our issues backlog for a more detailed scope.

…

Greetings Spring Community and Pivotal GemFire/Apache Geode Users-

One question I constantly get asked is, "What is the difference between Spring Data GemFire and Spring Data Geode?"

Now that Spring Data Geode is part of the Spring Data Release Train, beginning with Kay (see the official release announcement for more details), the timing is finally right to answer this question in an open forum.

To help answer this question, I set 2 simple objectives for both Spring Data GemFire and Spring Data Geode (collectively known as SDG^2 now):

1. First, and most importantly, allow users to seamlessly interchange Spring Data Geode with Spring Data GemFire, and vice versa.

2. Next, help users migrate their Spring Boot, Pivotal GemFire or Apache Geode based applications from their local development environment to a managed environment, like Pivotal CloudFoundry, with little to no code changes at all.

…

On behalf of the community, I am pleased to announce that the Release Candidate 1 (RC1) of the Spring Cloud Edgware Release Train is available today. The release can be found in Spring Milestone repository. You can check out the Edgware release notes for more information.

Notable Changes in the Edgware Release Train

Renamed starters

A number of starters did not follow normal Spring Cloud naming conventions. In Edgware, use of the deprecated starter will log a warning with the name of the new starter to use in its place. Below is a table of the deprecated starters and their replacements

Speaker: Josh Long

Hi Spring fans! In this tip, we'll look at how to get fast-feedback and do integration testing with Spring Cloud Contract. In this video, we'll focus on HTTP-based services.

We are pleased to announce that Spring Batch 4.0.0.M5 is now available via Github and the Pivotal download repository. This release represents the fifth 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 the previous 4.0.0 milestones. Specific updates include:

• Dependency updates
• FunctionItemProcessor
• Continued updates to documentation

Dependency updates

As the dependency graph of Spring Boot 2 evolves, we have been updating our dependencies to be in line with them. This round includes…