When we launched the new spring.io, we left comments off the blog. On one hand this was because we were time-constrained, and leaving them off was the simplest thing to do. On the other hand, it was an experiment in minimalism. We thought we'd see if we could reduce the number of channels for feedback, and in doing so improve the quality all around. We asked everyone to route their questions and feedback on our blog posts to the @springcentral Twitter handle, and many of you did that—thanks!

So how did it go? Well, we heard some feedback from the community that they miss comments on the blog…

Welcome everybody to a momentous This Week in Spring - Boot edition!

Today is, of course, April Fools day. There is a lot of great stuff out there as April 1st jokes go! We didn't prepare any practical jokes this year, but I always like to point people to this still-epic video of Spring co-founder Rod Johnson announcing the sale of SpringSource (as the company where Spring originated was named) to Microsoft! (in 2008, on April Fools)

That out of the way, there's far more interesting stuff to talk about today (with no bearing whatsoever on April Fools): Spring Boot which - just this morning - finally went GA! Congratulations to Phillip Webb and Dr. Dave Syer (and the scores of people who've helped them) on this amazing release.

I don't know what it looks like from the outside, looking in, but we on the Spring team have been watching Philip and Dave drive Boot from concept, to polished prototype where it made a huge splash at SpringOne2GX 2013, to GA over the last year and some change. Boot has informed many of the other Spring projects, including Spring Framework 4.0. A truly game-changing technology, and not just for the JVM, either.

If you haven't tried it yet, then now is the time. There'a a video on using Spring Boot from STS 3.5 (which is due soon as well). STS isn't required at all, but it does have some handy tools! Check it out.

1. The big news: Spring Boot 1.0.0 has reached it's first major release!
2. Spring Integration ninja Artem Bilan has just announced Spring Integration 3.0.2 and Spring Integration 4.0 M4. The new stuff in Spring Integration 3.0.2 is awesome, but scroll down for the Spring Integration, Boot & Java configuration demo! I'm tickled pink to see this release. #boot
3. Spring lead Juergen Hoeller has announced the Spring 4.0.3 release, with Java 8 support and much improved websocket support.
4. Spring Data legend Thomas Darimont has announced that Spring Data Redis 1.2.1 is now available. The new release includes bugfixes for RedisCacheManager and RedisTemplate.
5. Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke has just released the first milestone of Spring Data Dijkstra. Check it out!
6. On April 9, I'll be doing a vJUG presentation, live and worldwide, introducing Spring Boot. My hope is to - in the short space alloted - demonstrate what building an application with Spring Boot looks like. I'd love to see you there, and please feel free to also ask questions on the IRC channel. #boot
7. Our pal Chris Richardson has chimed in with a blog that describes an approach to building Microservices with Spring Boot. The example is in Scala. Check it out! #boot
8. Spring Boot's been nominated for Most Innovative Java technology. I'm not sure how the voting process works, but as soon as I find out, I'll post here. Either way, I hope we can count on your help to drive votes through! #boot
9. Marco Vermeulen put together a very nice talk introducing how to use Spring Boot to build microservices, as well. This example is in Groovy. #boot
10. Jim Drannbauer has put together a GitHub repository demonstrating how to use the recently released Spring MVC Test HtmlUnit and Cucumber together. With this in place, your unit tests almost read like human sentences! #boot
11. Our pal Matt Raible is back at it again, this time with not one, but two posts on using Spring Boot! The first post demonstrates how to add Swagger integration to a Spring Boot application, and the second demonstrates what its like to build an iOS client to a Boot backend application using the Ionic framework. #boot
12. The all and sundry blog is back, this time with a post on using Spring Boot and Scala together. Nice! Boot's a win no matter what language you're using! #boot
13. Sergi Almar is back this week with a post on how to monitor your websocket threadpools using JMX. This is a fine followup to his last post on detecting websocket connection and disconnection in Spring 4. #boot
14. The team behind our website has installed Disqus for comments on our blogs. I wish I could show you the emails, but the turnaround from "idea" to "comments are live!" in this instance was insanely quick. Agile, even.
15. Adam Shook gave a talk SpringOne2GX 2013 Replay: Hadoop - Just the Basics for Big Data Rookies at SpringOne2GX 2013 whose replay is now available online. Don't miss it!
16. Also available online is David Turanski and Luke Taylor's talk from SpringOne2GX 2013, Real Time Analytics with Spring. Check it out!
17. The replay of the talk that Spring LDAP lead Mattias Arthursson gave at SpringOne2GX 2013 last year introducing Spring LDAP 2.0 is now live

18. Did you miss Spring lead Juergen Hoeller's webinar introducing Spring 4 on Java 8? It's available now and definitely worth a watch!

We are pleased to announce the final milestone release towards Spring Integration 4.0 and the next maintenance release for the 3.0.x stream. The 3.0.2.RELEASE contains a small number of important fixes for the 3.0 release. Spring Integration 3.0 users are encouraged to upgrade to this release as soon as possible. Please see the 3.0.2 release notes and project page for more information.

Spring Integration 4.0 is the next generation of the framework, which is now based on the new Spring Framework 4.0 Messaging Module. See the Migration Guide for information about migrating applications from…

Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013 in Santa Clara, CA

Speakers: David Turanski, Luke Taylor

Today's solutions must provide the ability to interpret related events and understand trends that are happening right now. This session will cover some of the out of the box capabilities of Spring XD to tap into big data streams and generate metrics such as simple counters, aggregate counters, moving averages, rates of change, and histograms. Hands-on demos will show you how Spring XD uses Redis and GemFire's Continuous Query and Function Execution to incorporate real-time analytics into event-driven applications.

Learn More about Spring XD at: http://projects.spring.io/spring-xd

Learn More about Spring Data Redis at: http://projects.spring.io/spring-data-redis

Learn More about Spring Data Gemfire at: http://projects.spring.io/spring-data-gemfire

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Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013 in Santa Clara, CA

Speaker: Adam Shook

This session assumes absolutely no knowledge of Apache Hadoop and will provide a complete introduction to all the major aspects of the Hadoop ecosystem of projects and tools. If you are looking to get up to speed on Hadoop, trying to work out what all the Big Data fuss is about, or just interested in brushing up your understanding of MapReduce, then this is the session for you. We will cover all the basics with detailed discussion about HDFS, MapReduce, YARN (MRv2), and a broad overview of the Hadoop ecosystem including Hive, Pig, HBase, ZooKeeper and more.

Learn More about Spring XD at: http://projects.spring.io/spring-xd

Learn More about Spring Data Hadoop at http://projects.spring.io/spring-hadoop

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We are pleased to announce the availability of the Spring AMQP (for Java) 1.3.1.RELEASE.

The release includes some significant new features, including:

• Listener Container

• The listener container concurrency can be changed without first stopping the container and the listeners will be adjusted accordingly

• The listener container can dynamically adjust the concurrent consumers, based on workload

• The listener container now supports consumer priority (with RabbitMQ 3.2.x or greater)

• The listener container now supports the configuration of an exclusive consumer

• The listener container now supports auto-delete queues; redeclaring them if necessary when starting

• Rabbit Template

• The RabbitTemplate now has several convenient receiveAndReply methods

  …

We launched the spring.io site at last year's SpringOne/2GX, and today I'm glad to announce on behalf of the team that we're open-sourcing the Spring-based application that powers it.

We call the project Sagan, and it's been designed to serve as a reference for building modern web applications with Spring. The code is available now at github.com/spring-io/sagan, and it's easy to get started. Here's a short screencast to prove it:

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Over the coming weeks, we'll post a series of articles on the Sagan effort, exploring different aspects of the app, decisions behind its design, and chronicling its evolution. For example, while Sagan runs equally well today on JDK 7 and JDK 8, we're not yet taking advantage of Java 8 language features. As we do that, we'll blog about it here, and in the process demonstrate why we think Spring and Java 8 make such a great match.

In the meantime, take Sagan for a spin! For a start, you can get up and running locally, and then try deploying to Cloud Foundry at Pivotal Web Services.

Note: Register with the invitation code "sagan" for instantaneous account approval. The PWS team has made a limited number of these available, so it's first-come, first-served.

From there, you can explore the rest of the howto-style docs in the wiki, and we'd love it if you'd provide feedback along the way.

As GitHub's contributors graph shows, the Sagan project has already been a big team effort internally. Today, we couldn't be happier to invite everyone reading this post to join us. There is plenty to do, and pull requests are welcome!

UPDATE, May 16, 2014: A replay of the SpringOne2GX 2013 session, "spring.io inside and out" is also now available.

Dear Spring community,

It's my pleasure to announce that Spring Framework 4.0.3 is available. This is the first release of the framework after Java 8's launch last week; it is built with OpenJDK 8 GA now and includes the latest ASM 5.0.1 (with bytecode support at the JDK 8 GA level as well, superseding the custom ASM 4.2 fork that we were previously using).

http://projects.spring.io/spring-framework/

Spring Framework 4.0.3 also comes with significant enhancements in the WebSocket space, with a lot of real-life feedback incorporated back into the framework and its configuration options. It's…

Dear Spring Community,

I am pleased to announce the release of Spring Data Redis 1.2.1! This maintenance release contains some bugfixes in RedisTemplate as well as in RedisCacheManager.

As always this version is tested against Java 6, 7 and 8, for compatibility with Redis 2.6 and 2.8 as well as Spring Framework 4.0.3. You can run this Jira Query for a complete list of changes.

We look forward to your feedback on the forum or in the issue tracker.

Cheers, your Spring Data Team!