Wow! It's December 15th, friends; many of us on this planet will soon celebrate a new year! Hopefully, you've done a better job than I have of getting all my new year's resolutions finished in time for 2016! If you haven't, at least catching up on the latest and greatest in the Pivotal community won't be insurmountable! Let's see what's happened this week..

• Greg Turnquist's epic blog series on using Spring with React.js is now available online as a tutorial
• Spring Batch lead Michael Minella just announced Spring Batch 3.0.6 which contains lots of great contributions and bug fixes from the community
• the good Dr. David Syer put together a very good look at Spring Boot's memory characteristics in various configurations
• Spring RestDocs lead Andy Wilkinson just announced Spring Rest Docs 1.0.1 which is maintenance release that includes a number of changes, including improved support for documenting attributes in XML payloads. An immediate
• Spring Social lead Craig Walls has been hard at work adapting Spring Social to a recent breaking change…

Greetings Spring Community,

I hope you enjoyed my blog series on React.js + Spring Data REST. In that series, you got to build up a rich web app with hypermedia controls, conditional operations, messaging, and security.

To make things even better, that series has been bundled up and converted into a tutorial: https://spring.io/guides/tutorials/react-and-spring-data-rest/

Some key updates made along the way:

• require.js has been replaced with webpack as the JavaScript module builder/loader of choice
• The code is upgraded to ES6. This means that some of JavaScript's newest features like classes, arrow functions, and more are being used.
• bower has been replaced by npm as the package manager of choice
…

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.