Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! What a week! This week I'm in Kansas City for the 6,000+-strong developer conference of a single company's developers and then it's back to New York City for QCon NYC where I'll be talking up building cloud-native applications with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud. If you're in either place be sure to reach out to me and let's talk shop (Spring, and, optionally, in Kansas City, BBQ..)

• Spring co-founder and project lead Juergen Hoeller put together two must-read posts this week: the first looks at Java 8 and Spring 4 adoption. ALSO, much, much, much more importantly: HE MENTIONED THIS WEEK IN SPRING :D #WIN.
• Juergen also posted is one of my favorite in years, a brutally honest look at the Java EE 7 landscape and the depressing lack of (big-vendor) supported implementations options for production-supported Java EE containers. You know, the man has a point..
• The amazing Dr. Pollack (see above!) announced Spring XD 1.2 RC1. The new release is packed with lots of new stuff including an Apache Ambari plugin to package and deploy Spring XD into production, new analytics, new features and performance improvements for the Apache Kafka support, improved HA configuration for RabbitMQ, Sqoop metastore support, and a lot…

For security reasons, browsers prohibit AJAX calls to resources residing outside the current origin. For example, as you're checking your bank account in one tab, you could have the evil.com website in another tab. The scripts from evil.com shouldn’t be able to make AJAX requests to your bank API (withdrawing money from your account!) using your credentials.

Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) is a W3C specification implemented by most browsers that allows you to specify in a flexible way what kind of cross domain requests are authorized, instead of using some less secured and less powerful…

Note that there's a follow-up blog post about Spring 5 system requirements. You might want to start there if you're primarily interested in the Spring 5 planning process.

In our quest for Java EE integration, we're trying to actively embrace the latest generation of specifications such as JPA, Bean Validation and of course the Servlet and JMS APIs. As of Spring 4, we're supporting the Java EE 6 and 7 level of specifications side by side. We would like to raise it to the EE 7+ level (JPA 2.1, Bean Validation 1.1, and in particular Servlet 3.1 and JMS 2.0) soon but are facing a fundamental problem: the lack of EE 7 platform…

Spring Boot 1.2.4 has been released and is available now from repo.spring.io and Maven Central.

This maintenance release includes a small number of fixes and is a recommended upgrade for all users.

The first milestone of Spring Boot 1.3 will be released in the coming days and adds many exciting features. Stay tuned!

Project Page | GitHub | Issues | Documentation

We’re pleased to announce a second milestone release of Spring Statemachine 1.0.0.M2.

With this milestone we focused on features in regions and pseudostates. Regions provide more sophisticated functionality for a parallel execution of a states machines and pseudostates will bring more functionality for working with initial, terminate, history, choice, fork and join states.

One might ask what is a region and how it works with a state machine. A state machine is a specialization of a region where orthogonal regions are composed of a multiple independent state machines. This is a difficult…

We’re pleased to announce the first version of the Apache Ambari plugin for Spring XD.

Ambari is a cluster provisioning tool to install and manage various Apache projects like HDFS, YARN, Zookeeper or Kafka. Ambari has a concept of a stack definition which is used by both Pivotal and Hortonworks. The stack definition is usually made up of components supported by the maintainer.

This Ambari integration adds support for provisioning Spring XD with Pivotal HD 3.0 and Hortonworks HDP 2.2.

Spring XD is not part of the main Ambari distribution for PHD or HDP. However, it is easy to extend an…

On behalf of the Spring Data team, I am happy to announce the first milestone of the Spring Data release train Gosling. The release ships with 164 tickets fixed as well as Spring Data KeyValue joining the Spring Data release train with an initial milestone. The highlights of the release include:

• Spring 4.1 as a new minimum baseline.
• Simplified support for adding custom methods to all repositories throughout the individual modules (see this example).
• Declarative ad-hoc JPA 2.1 fetch graph declarations via @EntityGraph on repository methods.
• Gemfire 8.1 support including multi-index definition operations.
• SpEL expressions in @Query as well as support for $geoIntersects for MongoDB.
• Enhanced ZSET support for Spring Data Redis including ZRANGEBYLEX.
• A Spring Data REST module shipping the HAL browser as well as support for conditional GETs.
• Map-backed repositories (see this example)
• …

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in New York City in advance of QCon NYC next week talking to customers and working with the local Pivotal Labs team. If you're around be sure to say hi and let's talk code.

So, as usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it.

1. Our pal Nicolas Frankel's put together an awesome post on modularizing configuration for integration testing with Spring

• Spring Cloud co-lead Spencer Gibb just announced that Spring Cloud Consul 1.0.0.M1 is now available
• Don't miss Jamie O’Meara's upcoming webinar on continuous integration with Jenkins, Spring and Cloud Foundry
• Check out Phil Dutson's upcoming webinar on moving .jsp and JSTL pages to Thymeleaf
• Spring Integration lead Gary Russell just announced Spring Integration 4.2M1 is now available
• check out the replay of Marten Deinum's awesome talk that looks at how to modernize legacy applications with Spring
• Janne Valkealahti just announced that Spring Statemachine 1.0.0.M2 has been released.
• our pal Eugen Paraschiv did an interesting …

On behalf of the Spring XD team, I am very pleased to announce that the Spring XD 1.2 Release Candidate is now available for download. You can also install using rpm

The 1.2 RC1 release includes bug fixes as well as several new features and enhancements.

• Apache Ambari plugin to automate the deployment of Spring XD to a Hadoop cluster. Read more in the release blog for the plugin.
• A new Analytics tab in the UI that allows you to easily view gauges, counters, field-value counters and aggregate counters.
• Performance improvements for the Kafka Message Bus that places it on par with the performance benchmark applications that ship with Kafka. An upcoming blog will discuss XD performance in more detail
• Improved HA support for the Rabbit Message Bus, XD containers connect to the Rabbit Broker that hosts the queue that is being consumed
• Support for the Sqoop metastore and other …