Welcome to a very special This Week in Spring! Every year we wrap up with a recap of highlights from the year. This year's no different! It's been a heckuva year, and the Pivotal Spring and Cloud Foundry teams seem to deliver bigger and better tech every passing day. If you've been following This Week in Spring then you'll no doubt be aware of the changes! It's hard to keep up, even for me, with the dizzying pace of releases!

So, here are the top five things I'd encourage people to review from 2016:

• Spring Boot: this year saw the release of Spring Boot 1.4 which in turn contains support for Spring Framework 4.3, Hibernate 5, Couchbase, Neo4J, and a slew of other niceties as discussed in the changelog. This year, in Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.9, Spring Boot enjoys even greater integration with the platform, with deep support for Spring Boot Actuators, among many other things being surfaces in the Apps Manager console. Also, the downloads for Spring Boot are through the roof, going from 2.4 million a month in November 2015 to 10.2 million a month in 201…

On behalf of the Spring Integration team I’d like to announce the first (and final) Release Candidate of Spring AMQP 1.7, which is available in the Milestone Repository.

This release is mainly an intermediate between version 1.6.x and 2.0 for Spring Boot 1.5 and IO Platform Brussels compatibility.

Anyway there are several improvements and new features to explain here:

• Upgrade to Amqp Client 4.0 with appropriate RabbitConnectionFactoryBean changes

• Upgrade to Log4j 2.7 and required braking change fix for the log4j2.AmqpAppender

• Upgrade to Spring Retry 1.2 with important StatefulRetryOperationsInterceptor.setUseRawKey(true) for backward compatibility

• a new spring-rabbit-junit artifact is provided with several utilities (like BrokerRunning @Rule) which can be useful for testing Spring AMQP applications

• The SimpleMessageListenerContainer can now be started without queues to listen to at all. They can be provided later at runtime via addQueues()

• a ConnectionNameStrategy is provided for the ConnectionFactory to allow to identify application connections in the Broker or other monitoring and tracing tools

  …

Hi Spring fans! I'm taking some time off for the holiday so there won't be a new Spring Tips until after the new year. If you're itching for something to watch and learn, here are some resources to tide you over.

Happy new year!

• the Spring YouTube channel is a wonderful resource with countless talks and videos from previous years' SpringOne2GX, SpringOne Platform and Cloud Foundry summit conferences, our year-long webinar program and even various meetups and so on. This is one of my absolute favorite resources that, thanks to our own Pieter Humphrey, has grown in leaps and bounds in the last several years, exceeding even the Java YouTube channel in subscribers!
• the Spring Tips YouTube Playlist - all the previous installments of Spring Tips are captured in this playlist. If you missed an episode or simply want to review, start here! So far, in 2016, we've looked at Spring Integration, Kotlin, Circuit Breakers, Spring-aware beans, functional reactive endpoints in Spring 5, Spring Cloud Stream, Cloud Foundry, JTA, Bootiful Dashboards, Demystifying Spring Boot, and …

On behalf of the Spring Data team I'd like to announce the first (and final) release candidate of Spring Data train Ingalls. The release ships over 310 issues fixed (some of them previously released with Hopper service releases). The most important new features are:

• Upgrade to Spring 4.3(.5) as baseline - #294.
• Support to easily expose domain events as Spring application events from aggregate roots - DATACMNS-928.
• Support for exists projection from derived query methods - DATACMNS-875.
• Support for Javaslang's Option, collection and map types on repository query methods - DATACMNS-937, DATACMNS-940.
• Added Spring Data LDAP module taking over the repository implementation of Spring LDAP.
• Support for MongoDB aggregation operators added in latest releases - DATAMONGO-1536.
• Stream execution now rejects invocation without surrounding transaction in JPA - DATAJPA-1023…

It is my pleasure to announce that Spring Boot 1.4.3 has been released and is available now from repo.spring.io and Maven Central.

Spring Boot 1.4.3 includes over 70 fixes, improvements and 3rd party dependency updates! Thanks to all that have contributed!

If you're interested in helping out, check out the "ideal for contribution" tag in the issue repository. If you have general questions, please ask at stackoverflow.com using the spring-boot tag.

Project Page | GitHub | Issues | Documentation

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 3.8.3 release of the Spring Tool Suite, our Eclipse-based tooling.

STS 3.8.3 focuses on adopting Eclipse Neon.2 and fixing existing issues. The list of changes include:

• Updated to Eclipse Neon.2
• Added support for one-time passcode for Cloud Foundry targets in the Spring Boot Dashboard
• Added support for WAR packaging of Spring Boot apps when deploying them to CF in the Spring Boot Dashboard
• Added support for health-check in Cloud Foundry manifest files
• Fixed a number of most-reported errors from the automated error reporting
• and more...

To download the distributions, please go visit:

• Spring Tool Suite: https://spring.io/tools/sts/all

Detailed new and noteworthy notes can be found here: STS 3.8.3 New & Noteworthy.

Enjoy!

On behalf of the community, I’m pleased to announce the release of Spring Security 3.2.10, 4.1.4, and 4.2.1 which fix CVE-2016-9879. Users are encouraged to update immediately.

It is important to note that Spring Framework 3.2.x has reached EOL. As with Spring Framework, we expect all users to upgrade to 4.2.1+ for further support. Detailed instructions (including samples) on migrating both XML and Java Config based projects can be found in the reference appendix

Project Site | Reference | Guides | Help

On behalf of the community, I’m pleased to announce the release of Spring LDAP 2.2.1 and 2.3 RC1.

A special thanks to Mark Paluch for getting spring-data-ldap aligned on the Spring Data side!

Spring LDAP 2.3 RC1

This release brings in a new era for Spring Data compatibility. Integration for Spring LDAP and Spring Data has been moved to spring-data-ldap so that it can partake in the Spring Data release train and ensure compatibility with the latest and greatest Spring Data code base. For additional details refer to the changelog

Spring LDAP 2.2.1

This release contains some minor bug fixes along with an update to make updates to newer versions of Spring Data more seamless. For additional details refer to the changelog…

Speaker: Josh Long

Hi Spring fans! In this installment we look at the Spring Tool Suite, your premier Eclipse-based destination for building Spring applications.