Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's already June! Where. Does. The. Time. GO?? This week I'm in Chicago, IL, for the Chicago Coder Conference, Boston and New Hampshire for customer visits, London, England for Devoxx UK and Talin, Estonia for Geekout EE. If you're around be sure to say hi! Now then, we've got a lot to cover this week so let's get to it!

• Spring Cloud Services ninja Scott Frederick just announced the Spring Cloud Cloud Foundry Service Broker, which is a nice framework for building service brokers for the Cloud Foundry platform
• Spring Boot and Spring Cloud co-founder (the good) Dr. Dave Syer just put published the first post in a series on the reactive programming landscape
• Spring Integration ninja Artem Bilan just announced that Spring Integration Kafka 2.0.0.RC1 is now available
• not one to rest on his laurels, Artem also announced the Spring for Apache Kafka 1.0. RC1
• Spring Cloud Streams lead Marius Bogoevici has just announced Spring Cloud Stream 1.0.1.RELEASE…

On behalf of the team, I am pleased to announce that Spring Cloud Stream 1.0.1.RELEASE is now available. The artifacts can be found in Spring Repository as well as Maven Central.

As a maintenance release it includes a number of fixes and improvements, such as:

• additional configuration options for bindings;
• the ability to create binder configurations that do not interfere with the user-created ones; this is a feature useful for libraries that include Spring Cloud Stream under the hood and wish to do so

transparently.

The entire list of changes can be found here.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the project, and continue to do so either directly by opening pull requests or issues in GitHub issues, or asking Stack Overflow…

Greetings Spring community,

There has been a lot of buzz in the past six months over Spring 5 and Reactive Streams support. I personally witnessed the number of questions Rossen received during his Reactive Spring MVC talk at DevNexus back in March. And his reactive talk at Spring I/O conference more recently was VERY popular to attenders.

Based on the huge leaps and bounds Project Reactor has made in the past two years, we are taking two of our guides down:

• Creating an Asynchronous, Event-Driven Application with Reactor

• Uploading pictures with Reactor

Those guides are over two years old…

We are pleased to announce that the Spring AMQP 1.6 GA (1.6.0.RELEASE) is now available in the spring release repo, as well as in the Maven Central.

First of all, thanks to everyone who contributed to the project any way: JIRAs, GitHub issues, Pull Requests, blog posts & articles and even just with simple StackOverflow questions!

You can find the full feature pack in the previous Spring AMQP 1.6 RC1 blog post. You can refer to the what’s new in the reference documentation as well as the closed JIRA Issues for the entire 1.6 version.

Nevertheless we encountered with the couple last minute…

This article will explain in depth how to tackle issues related to database compatibility and the deployment process. We will present what can happen with your production applications if you try to perform such a deployment unprepared. We will then walk through the steps in the lifecycle of an application that are necessary to have zero downtime. The result of our operations will be applying a backward incompatible database change in a backward compatible way.

If you want to work through the code samples below, you will find everything you need in GitHub.

Introduction

Zero downtime deployment

What is this mythical zero downtime deployment? You can say that your application is deployed that way if you can successfully introduce a new version of your application to production without making the user see that the application went down in the meantime. From the user’s and the company’s point of view it’s the best possible scenario of deployment since new features can be introduced…

It's my pleasure to announce the release of Spring REST Docs 1.1.0.RELEASE which is now available for Maven Central, JCenter and our release repository.

Highlights

REST Assured

As an alternative to the lightweight server-less documentation generation offered by Spring Framework's MockMvc, you can now use REST Assured to test and document your RESTful services. This opens up Spring REST Docs to all four corners of the JVM and beyond, allowing you to document anything that you can access via HTTP.

The samples now include an app that is documented using REST Docs, built using Grails, and tested using Spock. A third-party sample that uses REST Docs to document an API implemented using Ratpack is also available. My thanks to Jenn Strater…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This last week was a bit crazy, though after a long restful weekend there's a lot of intersting content to invigorate us for the week ahead. I'll be speaking at a meetup on the 16th June, for those near Amsterdam that'd care to join us! As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get into it.

• Remember, the goal of microservices is, ultimately, to go faster and to get to production. To do continuous delivery. A huge part of that has to be moving code from integration and testing to production, automatically, and ideally with no downtime. I'd recommend this excellent blog by Spring Cloud team member Marcin Grzejszczak on zero-dotime deployments with a database. This is an excellent resource!
• speaking of micrservices and Spring, there's a neat introduction to doing microservices "Spring Boot way" (is there any other way? :D) on DZone by Santosh Singh
• want to learn more about Kotlin and Spring? Want to see why large organizations (like Netflix) are using Spring Cloud along with Kotlin? check our Spring team member Sébastien Deleuze's spring-kotlin…

We’re pleased to announce a release of Spring Statemachine 1.1.0. I'd like to start by saying thank you for all who contributed in any way to make this happen. Artifacts are available either from Maven Central or from Spring Repository.

What we got into this release(compared to 1.0.x):

• Comprehensive support for Spring Security.
• Context integration with `@WithStateMachine' has been greatly enhanced.
• StateContext is now a first class citizen with how user can interact with a State Machine.
• Features around persistence has been enhanced with a build-in support for redis.
• New feature helping with persist operations.
• Configuration model classes are now a public API.
• New features in timer based events.
• New Junction pseudostate.
• New Exit Point and Entry Point pseudostates.
• Configuration model verifier.
• New samples.
• UI modeling support using Eclipse Papyrus.
…

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! This week's already off to a crazy start. Sunday evening I returned from Kiev, Ukraine, where I spoke at JEEConf. Yesterday, Monday, I gave a talk with my friend Baruch from JFrog at yesterday's JFrog Swampup conference event in Napa, California. Today I'm off to Denver, Colorado for Gluecon, and then off to GOTO Chicago in Chicago, Illinois and I'll finish out the week in Washington DC for customer visits. I can't wait to see you all along the way!

• I hope you'll register for this upcoming webinar on distributed tracing with the Spring Cloud team's very own Adrian Cole and Marcin Grzejszczak
• Wow! Spring Roo 2.0M2 is packed with lots of cool looking features supporting Spring Boot and removing the older ActiveRecord-style support in favor of proper Spring Data repositories
• I really liked Stormpath founder and CTO Les Hazlewood's post on how they moved their entire backend API to Spring Boot in a matter of three weeks while embracing Spring Boot's autoconfiguration to solve a few problems of their own, like a Samza auto-configuration.
• the Udemy Spring Cloud workshop online looks pretty cool…