Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in rainy but beautiful Seoul, South Korea and Tokyo (come join me for a talk on Wednesday!), Osaka, and Hiroshima, Japan where I'll be doing a few meetups and talking to businesses of all shapes and sizes. If you're in either region, please hit me up!

This is my favorite time of year! As we lead to SpringOne Platform, there's so much good stuff being released that one can hardly keep up! I am really looking forward to this year's SpringOne Platform show, coming in early August. It's an amazing time to build applications, and SpringOne Platform is in a unique position to capture the larger discussion: why do we #devops, #cloud, #agile, or #microservice? Join the discussion August 1-4, 2016 in beautiful Las Vegas and let's find out!

So, let's get to it!

• JDriven's very own Mr. Haki put together a really cool post on using the Groovy language's ConfigSlurper as a Spring framework PropertySource
• the Accurest framework has been integrated into Spring Cloud as the basis for the upcoming Spring Cloud Contract (due to be released in Spring Cloud Camden), designed to promote CDC (contract driven consumers).
• Spring Boot 1.3.6 is now available!
• Spring Framework 4.3.1 and 4.2.7 are now available
• Spring for Apache Kafka 1.0 and Spring Integration Kafka 2.0 go GA
• Spring Cloud Brixton SR2 is now available
• Spring Session lead Rob Winch has just announced Spring Session 1.2.1
• Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.4.0.GA has been released
• Spring test ninja Sam Brannen just pushed JUnit 5 support to master for Spring Framework 5! This is really cool and a natural next step given all the work Pivotal, and Sam in particular, has done as a contributor to JUnit.
• the OpenCredo blog has a nice post on using HAL and (Spring) HATEOAS when implementing Microservices