We are pleased to announce that Spring Batch 3.0.6.RELEASE is now available via Maven Central, Github and the Pivotal download repository. This is the 6th maintenance release for the 3.0.x branch of Spring Batch and addresses a number of minor bug fixes and enhancements. Many thanks to all of those who submitted the many pull requests that went into this release.

Spring Batch Home | Source on GitHub | Reference Documentation

We look forward to your feedback in Jira, StackOverflow, or to me directly via Twitter @michaelminella.

I'm delighted to announce that Spring REST Docs 1.0.1.RELEASE is available from Maven Central, JCenter, and our release repository.

This maintenance release includes a number of changes, including improved support for documenting attributes in XML payloads. An immediate upgrade is recommended for all Spring REST Docs users.

Project Page | GitHub | Issues | Documentation

It has sometimes been suggested that Spring and Spring Boot are "heavyweight", perhaps just because they allow apps to punch above their weight, providing a lot of features for not very much user code. In this article we concentrate on memory usage and ask if we can quantify the effect of using Spring? Specifically we would like to know more about the real overhead of using Spring compared to other JVM applications. We start by creating a basic application with Spring Boot, and look at a few different ways to measure it when it is running. Then we look at some comparison points: plain Java…

Dear Spring Community,

I'm pleased to announce the release of Spring Social Facebook 2.0.3.RELEASE. This is a maintenance release that addresses a few bugs, the most significant of which was a breaking change introduced recently in Facebook's Graph API which prevented connections and sign-in from working with Spring Social Facebook. In addition, the API binding has been adjusted to target Graph API v2.5.

View the changelog for more details.

Project Site | Reference | JavaDoc

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Chicago speaking to customers and then it's off to Washington D.C., and New York City for Cloud Native meetups! I hope you'll consider joining us at either event!

Time sure is flying! We're darned close to 2016!

Anyway, as usual, lots to cover so let's get to it!

• I really like the looks of this Caffeine local cache. It uses a pretty interesting algorithm to ensure near optimal cache hits It already features a JSR 170 (JCache) integration which means using it could be as simple as configuring the JCache adapter along with Spring's Cache abstraction.
• I really enjoyed Pivotal Labs' Brian Kelly's presentation, Spring Boot for Rails Developers. Check it out!
• 3Pillar has an interesting post on using Spring Boot with Docker
• Spring Framework lead Juergen Hoeller has revisited the Spring 5.0 roadmap in light of the recent 6 month delay for JDK 9
• Spring RestDocs lead, Spring IO Platform lead, and Spring Boot ninja Andy Wilkinson …

You might have heard the news already: JDK 9 is going to be delayed by half a year, now aiming for a March 2017 release instead of its original September 2016 target.

Since Spring 5 is designed to track JDK 9 very closely, we decided to revisit our own roadmap as well: We are nevertheless going to start our release candidate phase in Q4 2016 but we won't go GA before March 2017 either. That said, we really mean it: The goal is for Spring Framework 5.0 to go GA right after JDK 9's GA date then.

The opportunity for you to start working with Spring 5 features will begin much sooner anyway, with…

I am pleased to announce that Gradle dependency management plugin 0.5.4.RELEASE is now available from Maven Central, JCenter, and the Gradle Plugin Portal.

This maintenance release includes a significant improvement in the performance of applying Maven-style exclusions to your Gradle builds. The change provides a 20x speed up, reducing the overhead, even with very complex dependency graphs, to 50ms or less.

For more information about how the plugin can improve your Gradle builds, please read the introductory blog post.

I’m pleased to announce the availability of Spring Cloud Connectors 1.2.1. This is a maintenance release with a few new features and a few bug fixes.

Here are the highlights:

Heroku Connector

Relational Databases

• The Heroku cloud connector now recognizes the DATABASE_URL environment variable when detecting PostgreSQL database.

Redis

• Heroku Redis is now supported.

Spring Connector

Relational Databases

• When creating a DataSource, Spring Cloud Connectors will look for a pooling DataSource implementation on the classpath and choose one based on a default priority. The priority of detection has been changed to more closely match the order used in Spring Boot.
• Applications can customize the priority order of pooled DataSource implementations using either Java configuration or XML configuration.
• DataSourceConfig will now accept a map of key/value pairs to allow setting arbitrary properties of the created DataSource. This allows overriding of the default JDBC driver class name and validation query set up by Connectors, in addition to other properties of the DataSource…

Wow! Can you believe we're already staring down 2016? Time sure flies! Remember, This Week in Spring was started the first week of 2011, so we'll soon mark the fifth anniversairry of TWiS!

This week I'm in Shanghai, China, for the Cloud Foundry Summit Asia and then off to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA, for the Rich Web Experience! If you're in either place, don't hesitate to reach me!

As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it!

• Spring Boot co-founder and Spring framework contributor Phil Webb put up a really thoughtful post helping people looking at Spring (which has been around for 10+ years) to avoid some of the common pitfalls facing new developers in 2016. A very recommended read!
• Florian Benz did a great job discussing the motivations and use of comprehensive REST documentation as generated with Spring Rest Docs. This is a really cool, quick read!
• Speaking of Spring Rest Docs, there's a great interview with the project lead, the amazing Andy Wilkinson who - in his ample free time - also manages the Spring IO Platform as well as contributes to Spring Boot. Read on to learn more about one of my heroes…