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…

Application events are available since the very beginning of the Spring framework as a mean for loosely coupled components to exchange information. One of the most well known usage of application events is the following:

@Component
public class MyListener 
        implements ApplicationListener<ContextRefreshedEvent> {
  
    public void onApplicationEvent(ContextRefreshedEvent event) {
        ...
    }
}

This allows MyListener to be notified when the context has refreshed and one can use that to run arbitrary code when the application context has fully started.

In Spring Framework…

Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2014.

Speaker: Cédric Champeau

More Groovy Track

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/SpringCentral/traits-design

Groovy 2.3 introduces the concept of traits in the language. Traits look like interfaces, but allow the developer to add both implementation and state into it. It introduces multiple inheritance in the language while avoiding the diamond problem. Traits will let you rethink the way you design APIs in Groovy, by favoriting composition of behaviors.

Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2014.

Speaker: Dan Woods, NetFlix

G&G Special Topics

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/SpringCentral/4pieter-springone2gx2014ratpack

Ratpack is an asynchronous web framework for the JVM that was inspired by the simplistic nature of Ruby's Sinatra framework. Written in Java, optimized for Groovy and Java 8, Ratpack sports a high throughput, simplistic interface for rapid development of rich, real-time web applications.

This post is a guest post by community member Julien Dubois (@juliendubois), a former SpringSource employee who now works for Ippon Technologies and is creator of the JHipster project. Thanks Julien! I'd like to see more of these guest posts, so - as usual - don't hesitate to ping me (@starbuxman)! -Josh

Introduction

JHipster, or "Java Hipster," is a handy application generator that will create for you a Spring Boot (that's the Java part) and AngularJS (that's the hipster part) application.

In a very short amount of time, JHipster has became very popular on Github, and it has been featured on online magazines - like InfoQ, Infoworld or SD Times - and in conferences all over the world - Paris, London, Montreal…