The Reactor team is happy to announce the release of 2.0.0.RC1, which is now available in the spring.io Maven repository as well as Maven central. Version 2.0 is an #uberupdate from Reactor version 1.1 and contains several new components as well as complete rewrites of important classes like Stream, which now implements the Reactive Streams standard.

Please note that the Maven coordinates for Reactor 2.0 have changed from those for Reactor 1.x. The new coordinates all fall under the group ID io.projectreactor rather than the previous org.projectreactor. A sample dependencies block for a Gradle…

Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2014.

Speaker: Steve Pember

G&G Special Topics

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/SpringCentral/reactive-grails

The natural tendency for application developers is to construct their code in a procedural, synchronous, monolithic pattern. Veteran developers know that this leads to error prone, unscalable, slow software - yet it is alarmingly prevalent. There have been several architectural patterns that have risen over the years which have attempted to mitigate this problem. One of the most popular has been Service Oriented Architecture, which involves breaking the monolithic application into a distributed system of several smaller services. In this talk, I argue that SOA is a decent start, but not nearly good enough. I will discuss the tenants of the Reactive Pattern and the importance of moving away from Monolithic to Reactive architectures. We will discuss the various Groovy-friendly technologies that allow us to build distributed, micro-service based applications and cover effective communication strategies between each service. We will see how being Reactive is the only viable architecture for large, efficient, scalable systems. If Reactive is new to you, this should be an excellent introduction.

Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2014.

Speaker: Sam Brannen, Swiftmind

Core Spring Track

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/SpringCentral/testing-with-spring-framework-4x

The Spring Framework has undergone a lot of innovation in the 4.0 and 4.1 releases, and so has its testing support. Join Spring Test component lead Sam Brannen in this talk to discover what's new in Spring's testing support in 4.0 through 4.1. This talk will provide attendees an overview of what's been deprecated, what's changed, and what's been introduced in Spring's testing support over the last two years, with real life examples and tips for best practices. Highlights include using SocketUtils to scan for free TCP & UDP server ports, the ActiveProfilesResolver API, meta-annotation support for test annotations including attribute overrides, best practices with TestNG, using Groovy scripts to configure an ApplicationContext for integration tests, improvements to SQL script execution and embedded databases, the new TestContext framework bootstrap strategy, programmatic transaction management in tests, and more.

Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2014.

Speaker: Josh Long, Phil Webb

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/SpringCentral/bootiful

Core Spring Track

Alright, so maybe "bootiful" won't ever work, but we tried, and it was worth it too because you're reading this. Spring Boot, the new convention-over-configuration centric framework from the Spring team at Pivotal, marries Spring's flexibility with conventional, common sense defaults to make application development not just fly, but pleasant! Join Spring developer advocate Josh Long and Spring Boot co-lead Phillip Webb for a look at what Spring Boot is, why it's turning heads, why you should consider it for your next application (REST, web, batch, big-data, integration, whatever!) and how to get started.

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I've been in studio recording the next iteration of the Spring Livelessons series, this one on building cloud-native applications (microservices) with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and Cloud Foundry. It's been a lot of fun, and - this morning - I took a break to do two 1.5 hour webinars for O'Reilly on building Spring Boot applications and Spring Cloud microservices, both entirely live coded! It's been a fun week for me, and I hope it has for you, as well.

This Thursday the 19th marks the culmination of this year's Lunar New Year, or Chinese new year or Spring festival. What's this to do with Spring (the technology)? Not much, besides being a celebration of better things to come and a great name! So happy new year…

Spring Cloud 1.0.0.RC3 is available now from https://repo.spring.io/libs-milestone-local. This is (hopefully) the last milestone release before 1.0.0. There were some bug fixes since 1.0.0.RC2 and also a few small new features:

• Refactored the Feign support to look a bit more like Spring Data (so @EnableFeignClients instead of @FeignClientScan).
• Support for multipart/form-data in the Zuul proxy
• Support for including and excluding remote services in the automatic route registration in Zuul
• Support for declarative Ribbon retry in Zuul
• Cleaned up of a lot of dependencies. If you use the spring-cloud-starters you should get a nice consistent experience of adding and subtracting features. Gradle users need to use the dependency management plugin for the same experience.
• Added small, bite-sized sample projects…

Six months after the 1.0 GA release, the team is happy to announce the availability of Spring XD 1.1 GA.

Download Links:

• 1.1.0.RELEASE: zip, homebrew, yum.
• 1.0.4.RELEASE: zip.

Please read Sabby Anandan's blog for a general overview of Spring XD. Specific to 1.1, a ton of features have been added. Here are some that will give you the most bang for your big data buck.

• Stream Processing with Reactor, RxJava, Spark Streaming and Python
• Orchestrate Spark and Sqoop Batch Jobs
• Kafka based message bus, source and sink along with new general purpose high level Kafka APIs
• Batching and compression for RabbitMQ
• Easily develop, test, and package custom modules and upload them to the admin server.
• Containers group management when running XD on YARN
• Role based authorization of REST endpoints and LDAP/file based authentication
• Support for Pivotal, Hortonworks, and Cloudera Hadoop distributions.
…

Whether you’re at home, office, or in-transit, connectivity is the norm. It’s a part of daily life that we’ve all come to expect and depend on. Connectivity between people and information is all about the movement and analysis of data: data delivers insights, and these insights must increasingly deliver immediate results to users. This level of always-on, always-available connectedness presents numerous challenges. The type of data, formats, and volume is dynamic, as are the data-producing agents.

Spring XD addresses these numerous challenges within a unified platform. Whether through…

Recently James Ward wrote a great blog post, “Java Doesn’t Suck – You’re Just Using it Wrong”, which highlighted numerous challenges that enterprise Java developers face in their daily routines building Java applications. The good news is that breaking out of the development rut is much easier than you may think. Over the last few years, Spring has redefined how modern Java applications are built while dramatically improving development velocity. In this post, I’ll use James Ward’s blog post as a backdrop to explain how Spring helps developers rock the JVM (using Java) while tackling each of…