The Spring Blog

Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I’m in Manchester, UK, for an appearance at the Manchester JUG and then it’s off to London, UK, for some customer visits and the epic Devoxx UK event. This time next week I’ll be in Denver, USA, for the SpringOne Tour event. If you’re in any of these places, as usual, don’t hesitate to reach out and say hi (@starbuxman)

• Missed an installment of This Week in Spring? Well, have no fear there’s now a monthly aggregation of the weekly aggregation! Here’s the April edition
• Dormain Drewitz swoops in for the kill with this epic announcement: Pivotal and Confluent are teaming up to make Pivotal’s Kubernetes environment, PKS, the best place to run Confluent Kafka
• Spring Framework luminary Stéphane Nicoll just announced Spring Framework .3.17 and 5.0.6
• Spring Data legend Mark Paluch just announced the release of Spring Data Ingalls SR12 and Kay SR7. These releases are, as usual, packed with new releases!
• Spring Batch and Spring Cloud Task lead Michael Minella has just announced Spring Cloud Task 2.0.0.RELEASE. The new release updates dependencies, supports restricts concurrent task execution, and refined behavior when a failed batch job execution fails a task.
• The Pivotal blog looks at state management with Spring Session.
• In last week’s Spring Tips, I looked at using the new metrics collection facade Micrometer in the Actuator in Spring Boot 2. Check it out!
• BOSH is an abstraction layer that lets you describe immutable infrastructure in a IaaS-agnostic way. There are BOSH providers for AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenStack, VSphere, and a zillion other service providers. Cloud Foundry, which is optimized for the management of applications, builds on top of BOSH. This allows for its unparalleled portability. Now, there is a Kubernetes BOSH CPI. This is very promising!
• The New Stack looks at T-Mobile’s ushering in of 5G with Tibco and CloudFoundry
• Check out senior Spring fan Matt Raible’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Testing Spring Boot APIs and Angular Components with WireMock, Jest, Protractor, and Travis CI” over on the Okta blog.
• Pivotal Principal Technologist Jim Weaver looks at reactive programming with this amazing demo.
• I love this post! It’s got nothing to do with Spring, but you’ll probably want to read it if you’re an aspiring cloud-native. It’s a post from folks at Pivotal on the soft touch reconfigurations that they made to the use of public cloud IaaS resources to save as much as $675,000 per year.
• https://twitter.com/springframework/status/993844928915623936
• The Swisscom blog looks at the power of buildpacks. Buildpacks stage an environment for a particular type of application workload that then gets turned into a container that then is run on a platform like Heroku or Cloud Foundry
• The Baeldung has a nice post that looks at the Assert class in Spring Framework. Short and sweet!
• This E4Developer blog looks into Spring Data and its various applications in the world of microservices.
• This isn’t related to Spring, per se, but it’s interesting; it’s a post on the jOOQ blog that looks at the different ways to reflectively access default methods on interfaces in Java 8, 9 and 10.
• Community comrade Michael Simons does a nice job introducing reactive Spring in this German language post
• Pivotal Principal Technologist Mario Gray looks at websockets, complete with a Spring-based demo. This is well worth a read and bookmark!
• Pivotal Principal technologist Jakub Pilimon has put together a nice post on testing distributed message-driven applications with Spring. It iterates, starting from the lowest level primitives in Spring’s messaging support and then moving to Spring Cloud Contract. This is an awesome post - read it!
• Community patron Nicolas Frankel has a nice post on checking the quality of Kotlin code with Detekt and SonarQube. If you’re a Spring devloper writing your code in Kotlin, you might like this.
• Speaking of testing messaging code, Clinton Magro put together Spring Boot autoconfiguration and starter that lets you embed the Qpid AMQP-compatible broker for, among other things, ease of testing
• twitter.com
• Piotr Szybicki looks at performance testing Angular and Spring applications secured with Keycloak using Gatlin. This is the first of two worth-a-read posts.
• The Java Mission Control application - your one-stop-shop for debugging and diagnostics of Java applications that has historically shipped in Oracle’s JDK - is now open source! Hurray!
• Spring Data’s Christoph Strobl teased some of the new transaction support in Spring Data MongoDB
• Last week Pivotal and Confluent announced a partnership to bring Kafka to Pivotal’s Kubernetes environment and I hope you’ll forgive my indulgent reminder that you’ll probably love this oldie-but-a-goodie Spring Tips video on Spring Cloud Stream and Kafka Streams
• Microservices thought leader (I’m not being ironic!) Daniel Bryant has put together a table that looks at the steps to cloud-native for both developers and platforms
• Rajagopal ParthaSarathi looks at parallel processing with Spring Batch
• This is pretty cool - the Oracle Devs blog has a nice post on distributed tracing infrastructure with OpenZipkin, Apache Kafka, and Apache Cassandra. It even uses Spring!

On behalf of the Spring Data team, I’d like to announce the availability of the Ingalls SR12 and Kay SR7 service releases. Both releases pick up the just-released Spring Framework versions 4.3.17 and 5.0.6, respectively. The upcoming Spring Boot 1.5.13 will pick up Ingalls SR12, and Spring Boot 2.0.2 picks up Kay SR7 for your convenience.

Both releases ship with over 100 tickets fixed in total and are recommended upgrades to all users of the Ingalls and Kay release trains. You can find all the details within the linked changelogs.

It is my pleasure to announce that Spring Framework 4.3.17 and 5.0.6 have been released and are available now from repo.spring.io and Maven Central.

Spring Framework 4.3.17 includes 15 fixes and a selection of improvements. Spring Framework 5.0.6 contains over 40 fixes and improvements. Those maintenance releases will be used for the upcoming Spring Boot 1.5.13 and 2.0.2 releases coming up later this week.

2018-05-09 Update: The releases address a vulnerability. Please see this blog post published after the associated Spring Boot 2.0.2 and 1.5.13 releases.

We are pleased to announce that Spring Cloud Task 2.0.0.RELEASE is now available on Github and the Pivotal download repository. Many thanks to all of those who contributed to this release.

What’s New?

Spring Cloud Task 2.0.0.RELEASE is intended to be the version of the framework aligned with Spring Boot 2. Updates from 1.2.x include:

• Updates to all dependencies.
• Restricting concurrent task execution.
• A failed batch job execution fails a task.

Let’s walk through these updates in more detail.

Update to All Dependencies

speaker: Josh Long

Hi Spring fans! In this installment of Spring Tips we look at the Micrometer metrics collection and publication facade. Micrometer is a new project from Pivotal that underpins the Actuator metrics endpoint in Spring Boot 2.0.

Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! In the last week I went from Germany (for JAXON) to Linz, Austria (for DevOne) and Vienna, Austria (for a meetup) and now I’m in Melbourne, Australia (after a 10 hour stopover in Bangkok, Thailand), for the VOXXED Melbourne event. As usual, if you’re around I’d love to hear from you!

Without further ado, we’ve got a lot to cover so let’s get to it!

• Pivotal just turned 5! Happy birthday to us!
• Spring Cloud contributor Ryan Baxter has just announced Spring Cloud Finchley RC1. The new release is packed with all sorts of new stuff and represents one of hopefully the final releases before Spring Cloud Finchley before it’s GA
• Hi Spring fans! In last week’s installment of Spring Tips I looked at how to extricate process state - valuable for coordinating long running or mutli-actor processes - from business logic with Spring Statemachine
• the RabbitMQ 3.7.5-beta2 is now available.
• I really like this Chinese-language post on whether Spring Boot and Spring Cloud can be used by small and medium-sized companies
• The RabbitMQ blog has a nice post on using the Micrometer integration in the RabbitMQ Java client to integrate with Datadog
• Jeroen Reijn gave a nice presentation on test-driven Spring REST Docs-based documentation
• The Ordina blog has a nice post on using Spring Cloud Contract to support consumer-driven contracts.
• I love this post by Gaurav Gupta on synchronous request/reply with Apache Kafka and Spring
• The Baeldung has another interesting post (related to Servlets) that looks at the @ServletComponentScan in Spring Boot: it detects all Servlet API WebFilter, WebListener, and WebServlet annotations on servlet components.
• This is an oldie-but-a-goodie from the Baeldung blog: a Quick Intro to the SpringBootServletInitializer, which is the mechanism that let’s Spring Boot applications run in a Servlet container setup, as opposed to a fat-.jar.
• Do not miss this new guide on Spring Cloud Gateway
• Bartosz Jedrzejewski put together a nice post on using Reactor (in a Spring WebFlux application) to obtain parallelism and backpressure
• And yet another Baeldung post, this time with a review of the state of Java. The numbers in this year’s survey are very interesting! The numbers are very promising: Java 8 is now, by far, the majority deployed version of Java. Java 9 and 10 are gaining ground, though! Also interesting: Spring Framework 4 and Spring Framework 5 are are, by far, the majority deployed enterprise Java framework. The precise numbers aren’t clear, but it looks to be almost 75% of the pie-chart. Java EE and “Other” technologies account for what I’d guess is 20% of the remaining deployments, followed by Spring Framework 3, which looks to be about 5% or so (Maybe less?) Of the deployments that are based on Spring, a majority are based on Spring Boot, with less than 20% or so based on Spring without Spring Boot. IntelliJ, Apache Tomcat, and Maven are the clear leaders, too. Also interesting: Groovy, Kotlin and Scala (in that order) are the leaders in non-Java languages.
• The Heroku documentation has a great list of steps that are required to make a Spring Boot application cloud-ready. This blog was published on the Heroku blog but a lot of it applies to building cloud-native applications for any platform
• This post demonstrates how to test in a Spring application without Spring. It sets up a scenario that should be very uncommon, field injection, and demonstrates how adversely this affects the goals of testing. Remember what I always say: “every time you do field injection, a unit test dies!” The post then looks at how to test components, and to even remove Spring from the testing process.
• Nicolas Frankel looks at changes in Spring Boot 2’s Actuator
• I love this cheat sheet on using Java 10
• The Spring Cloud team is hiring! Join us!
• Michael Simons and Michael Plöd put together a nice German-language slidedeck on Spring Boot 2
• The All and Sundry blog has a nice post on configuring a simple route with Spring Cloud Gateway
• Part two of my series on building reactive Spring-based applications is now available in Java Magazine
• The Java Revisited blog has a nice post on the motivations for pursuing certification in Spring Cloud
• The call-for-papers for the inaugural RabbitMQ Summit on November 12th, 2018 at CodeNode in London, UK is now open!

On behalf of the community, I am pleased to announce that the Release Candidate 1 (RC1) of the Spring Cloud Finchley Release Train is available today. The release can be found in Spring Milestone repository. You can check out the Finchley release notes for more information.

Notable Changes in the Finchley Release Train

Finchley.RC1 is based on Spring Boot 2.0.1.

Spring Cloud Task

• Release Announcement

Spring Cloud Config

• Set refresh rate for Git repos
• Bug Fixes

Spring Cloud Bus

• Bug Fixes

Spring Cloud Netflix

Speaker: Josh Long

Hi Spring fans! In this installment we’ll look at how to extricate process state - valuable for coordinating long running or mutli-actor processes - from business logic with Spring Statemachine.

Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another incredible installment of all that’s fit to tweet, blog, record and print about Spring! It’s been an insane week! Since our last installment I was in Paris, FR, for the epic Devoxx FR conference where I spoke at a meetup hosted by ZenikaIT, gave a workshop on Reactive Cloud Native Java and co-presented a talk on Reactive Spring with the one-and-only Juergen Hoeller. I jumped off stage and ran to the airport to board a flight leaving 150 minutes later headed back to the US!

I am pleased to announce that Gradle dependency management plugin 1.0.5.RELEASE is now available from Maven Central, Bintray, and the Gradle Plugin Portal. This maintenance release fixes a handful of issues. It was included in the recent Spring Boot 1.5.12 and 2.0.1 releases and is also a recommended upgrade for all other users of the plugin.