Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it!

• Spring ninja Stephane Nicoll just announced Spring Boot 1.3.0.M3, chock full of great features including HTTP session persistence, JMS and AMQP improvements, logging improvements, and auto-configurations for the H2 Database console and embedded MongoDB.
• Spring Batch lead Michael Minella just announced Spring Batch 3.0.5
• Check out this cool look at using Spring Boot to process Twitter feeds with Neo4j
• check out this interesting Chinese-language post on using .yml with Spring Boot
• Disid corporation has just announced a maintenance release for Spring Roo
• Just saw this post. Our very own Cornelia Davis, director of platform engineering, was recognized as one of the top 10 women in cloud by CloudNOW! As she has for years now, she'll be at SpringOne2GX…

It is my pleasure to announce that Spring Boot v1.3.0.M3 is available now from the Spring milestone repository. This release includes 90 fixes and improvements and merges 38 pull-requests! Thanks again to everyone that has contributed.

Highlights of the new release include:

• HTTP session persistence (enabled automatically with Devtools)
• Configuration improvements for JMS and AMQP endpoints
• Various Logback and log4j 2 improvements
• Auto-configuration classes can now be excluded via configuration
• Auto-configuration for embedded MongoDB
• Auto-configuration for H2 web console

For a complete list of changes, and upgrade instructions, see the Spring Boot 1.3 Release Notes on the wiki and the updated reference documentation…

On behalf on the Spring Roo team at DISID Corporation, I am pleased to announce that Spring Roo 1.3.2 RC1 released candidate is out.

Spring Roo is a rapid application development tool for Java, allowing you to create full enterprise applications in just minutes.

Spring Roo jar files have been published to Maven Central. As always, the release is available in the Spring IO repository.

The candidate release fixes the following issues:

• Error adding InnerType constructor on ITD Generation ROO-3583
• JavaBean implementing Interface defining getters and setters ROO-3584
• JavaBean implementing Interface and overriding getter causing null pointer ROO-3585
• Request loose additional parameters when change language ROO-3595
• Add support to generate Generic Methods ROO-3648
• Update Selenium to support later versions of Firefox ROO-3634
• Add renderLabel attribute in form fields tags ROO-3639
• JpaActiveRecord entity implementing interface with getId(): double generation ROO-3587
• Update Tomcat7 Maven plugin version ROO-3652
• Generate command "selenium all" …

We are pleased to announce that Spring Batch 3.0.5.RELEASE is now available via Maven Central, Github and the Pivotal download repository. This is the 5th maintenance release for the 3.0.x branch of Spring Batch and addresses a number of minor enhancements as well as bringing Spring Batch fully compatible with Spring Framework 4.2. 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.

…

We’re pleased to announce a third milestone release of Spring Statemachine 1.0.0.M3.

A lot has happened since a previous milestone and getting here took a bit more time we originally estimated. Now that we're here, let's crack it and see what new features we have in this release.

Beyond usual bug fixes here is a list of main new features:

• Distributed state machine
• Persisting state machine context
• Relax use of enums as states and events
• Programmatic instantiation of state machines
• New recipe modules
• New samples (persist, zookeeper, web)

#Distributed state machine

Distributed state is a new…

On behalf of the Spring Data team, I am pleased to announce the availability of the first and final release candidate of Spring Data release train Gosling. The release ships 121 fixes and enhancements, most notably the following ones:

• Querydsl integration for Spring MVC and Spring Data REST (see the example for details).
• Improved compatibility with Spring Framework 4.2 and Spring Boot dev tools.
• Spring Data JPA now exposes a JpaContext to easily obtain an EntityManager per domain type.
• RepositoryRestConfigurer for less invasive configuration in Spring Data REST.
• Spring Data Redis uses Lettuce fork maintained by Mark Paluch.
• Support for ReadPreference in Spring Data MongoDB aggregations.
• Support for range facets in Spring Data Solr.
• Dependency upgrades to Spring Framework 4.1.7, Guava 18 and Jackson 2.6.
…

We are pleased to announce the Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.3 M1 milestone release.

The most important enhancements in the Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.3 M1 version:

• Add Hadoop 2.7.1 as the default release
• Add support for HDP 2.3 and CDH 5.4.4
• Bug fixes: Fix for append reopen may fail SHDP-510
• Better boot support: Support boot config props metadata SHDP-452
• Add support for Hive 1.x and HiveServer2

See the release changelog for details.

To be able to use Hive 1.x which dropped support for HiveServer1 and the corresponding Thrift client we had to rewrite the Hive support in Spring for Apache…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Washington D.C., delivering some cloud-native realtalk at the Agile 2015 conference with my pal Andrew Clay Shafer then it's off to Denver, CO, again to speak to customers! If you're in either area, say hi!

We're fast approaching SpringOne2GX 2015! Things are getting exciting around here as the team delivers more and more amazing bits! The weeks to come, leading into SpringOne2GX, are my favorite time of the year. Watch this space for new releases aplenty!

• The biggest announcement, this week, of course, is the General availability of Spring framework 4.2! Get the bits while they're hot! This is a game changer release, packed with new features! I'll wait while you go read the new features list..
• ..Welcome back! Have you upgraded your applications already to Spring framework 4.2? Good! Next up on the list: Spring framework lead Juergen Hoeller's followup post looking forward to the next feature release of Spring Framework, 4.3
• Spring Session (and Spring Security!) lead Rob Winch just announced Spring Session 1.0.2…

As a follow-up to the Spring Framework 4.2 GA announcement and also to my earlier post on Spring Framework 5 system requirements, I'd like to take the opportunity to summarize our core framework plans for next year:

#Spring Framework 4.3

First up will be Spring Framework 4.3 in Q2 2016, as a final feature release in the 4.x series. As mentioned, this will still be designed for the general Spring 4 system requirements (Java 6+, Servlet 2.5+) and getting prepared for an extended 4.3.x support life until 2019, in particular for users on JDK 6 and 7 but also for applications deployed to older app…