Introduction

It has been almost 10 years now since I taught my first Core Spring class. At that time almost everything was XML and configuring JPA or Spring Security, for example, could be a lot of hard work. Spring has matured a great deal in the meantime with component-scanning, Java Configuration and Spring Boot making it much more fun to use. And the number of Spring Projects has increased considerably.

Pivotal Training continues to enhance our Spring curriculum and introduce new courses - including Spring Boot Developer and Spring Cloud Services. I have provided an overview of these courses and some of the newest features below. Most importantly, how you obtain Certification has changed.

On behalf of the Spring Data team, I’d like to announce the availability of the third milestone of the release train Kay.

The most significant change is an improved naming scheme for CrudRepository. We extracted the store-specific CustomConversions to Spring Data Commons and introduced bi-directional type-based converters to maintain a single API for common conversion code. You can now define converters using lambdas. You need to adopt your code to the renamed methods. MongoDB ships with a renamed annotation for reactive tailable cursors, we renamed @InfiniteStream to @Tailable. Users of Spring Data for Apache Cassandra can now upgrade to a higher Guava version as we upgraded to Datastax driver 3.2.0.

Hi Spring fans! This week I’m in Austin, Texas for OSCON; London, UK, for Devoxx UK; and Nice, France for RivieraDev! If you’re around, I’d love to talk to you so don’t hesitate to say hi!

• Spring Framework 5 RC1 is now available!
• InfoQ has a nice post on the new Spring Vault release
• Spring Integration lead Gary Russell just announced Spring AMQP 2.0M4 is now available
• Spring Cloud ninja Ryan Baxter just announced Spring Cloud Camden SR7 has been released
• I liked this short-but-sweet look at the Pivotal Cloud Cache on Pivotal Cloud Foundry, in terms of a Spring Boot application
• Periodic reminder: Spring Cloud Contract helps you solve the problem of integration testing distributed systems- don’t sleep on this!
• Spring ninja Stéphane Nicoll‏ announced that there is now a starter for Reactive Redis support on the Spring Initializr
• I really enjoyed this discussion of the benefits of self-contained services (as compared to microservices) on InfoQ
• Kamala Dasika has put together a nice look going upstack when applying the 3 Rs of security
• the new Spring Cloud Data Flow page has a very convenient getting-started experience
• Praneeth Ramesh did a nice job introducing Cloud Foundry for developers
• I liked this post by Michael Simons digging into what makes a Spring Boot starter

On behalf of the team, I am pleased to announce that Service Release 7 of the Spring Cloud Camden Release Train is available today. The release can be found in our Spring Release repository and Maven Central. The documentation can be found here. The release notes can be found here.

The following modules were updated as part of Camden.SR7:

• Spring Cloud Commons 1.1.9.RELEASE
• Spring Cloud Netflix 1.2.7.RELEASE
• Spring Cloud AWS 1.1.4.RELEASE
• Spring Cloud Consul 1.1.4.RELEASE Dependency Fixes
• Spring Cloud Security 1.1.4.RELEASE Documentation Fixes
• Spring Cloud Sleuth 1.1.4.RELEASE
• Spring Cloud Stream Brooklyn.SR3 fixes issues with Spring Cloud Bus, Hystrix, and Turbine. See this issue for more information.
• Spring Cloud Contract 1.0.5.RELEASE

Dear Spring community,

It is my pleasure to announce that a feature-complete Spring Framework 5.0 release candidate is available now! We are expecting a further release candidate at the end of May and a final release in late June at this point.

As a major revision of the core framework, 5.0 RC1 comes with a Java 8+ baseline and many infrastructure refinements: e.g. our own Commons Logging bridge autodetecting Log4j 2, SLF4J, JUL by default; streamlined use of Servlet 3.1+; and early support for JUnit 5.0 M4.

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I’m in Perth, Australia, for the amazing YOW! West conference, talking to developers about building cloud native Java applications. If you’re around, say hi. As usual, we’ve got a lot to cover so let’s get to it!

I’m super excited about our first Spring Days event, on May 30-31, in Chicago. I’ll be there along with other Spring gurus like Eddu Melendez, Anupama Pradhan, and Michael Minella. I hope you’ll join us!

• Spring IO lead Any Wilkinson has announced Spring IO Platform Athens-SR5. He also announced Spring IO Platform Brussels-SR2
• Spring Session lead Rob Winch just announced Spring Session 1.3.1
• Spring Integration lead and all around great human Gary Russell just announced Spring for Apache Kafka 2.0M1
• Spring Cloud ninja Glenn Renfro just announced Spring Cloud Task 1.2.0
• I loved (in case you were unclear about the sentiment I have for this post!) this look at real time sentiment analysis with TensorFlow and Spring Cloud Data Flow
• the results of this months’ ZeroTurnaround web framework report are not too surprising: Spring MVC is in a distant lead, then JSF and GWT, then Spring Boot.
• this post, “Bootiful Development with Spring Boot and Angular,” on the Okta blog, is another gem by our buddy Matt Raible.
• Check out the ZT (short for ZeroTurnaround) Live replay for an epic look at Reactive Spring by Spring WebFlux engineer Sebastien Deleuze.
• Spring Cloud engineer Jon Schneider is cooking up some very cool stuff, and it might be an indication of future direction. Who knows!? But you should definitely check out his project, Spring Metrics
• My buddy Matt Raible and I looked at building progressive web applications with Spring Boot and Angular at our recent two-parter talks at Devoxx France 2017: part 1 and part 2. This was so much fun! Merci mille fois, Devoxx France! Thank you Devoxx France for letting us do these sessions!
• I did an interview with the amazing Software Engineering Daily Podcast on Spring Boot. It was a lot of fun being on there. I listen to the podcast regularly and really appreciate the opportunity!
• I liked this post by Alex Soto on using Arquillian to test Spring Data applications.
• this is an interesting post on discovering an microservices exposed port in a Docker container. Seems.. painful. I’m glad it’s so thoroughly documented and articulated here, though! Good stuff!

I am pleased to announce that Spring IO Platform Brussels-SR2 is now available from both repo.spring.io and Maven Central.

This maintenance release upgrades the versions of a number of the projects in the Platform:

• AspectJ 1.8.10
• Spring AMQP 1.7.2
• Spring Boot 1.5.3
• Spring Data Ingalls SR 3
• Spring Framework 4.3.8
• Spring Integration 4.3.9
• Spring Kafka 1.1.4

The versions of a number of third-party dependencies have also been updated.

Project Page | GitHub | Issues | Documentation

I am pleased to announce that Spring IO Platform Athens-SR5 is now available from both repo.spring.io and Maven Central.

This maintenance release upgrades the versions of a number of the projects in the Platform:

• AspectJ 1.8.10
• Spring AMQP 1.6.9
• Spring Boot 1.4.6
• Spring Data Hopper SR 10
• Spring Framework 4.3.8
• Spring Integration 4.3.9

The versions of a number of third-party dependencies have also been updated.

Project Page | GitHub | Issues | Documentation

On behalf of the community, I’m pleased to announce the release of Spring Session 1.3.1.RELEASE. This release contains numerous bug fixes. A special thanks to Vedran Pavić and John Blum for all their hard work!

Some of the highlights include:

• #756 - Usage of Spring Data Redis 1.7.1 which has critical bug
• #757 - Restore proper behavior of HttpSession created events in GemFire
• #755 - Improve GemFire SessionRepository, (HTTP) Session copy logic

Project Site | Reference | Help