Hi Spring fans, and welcome to the first day of the Spring season! This week I'm in San Francisco visiting some customers and just hanging out, working on new Spring Tips installments, enjoying the amazing weather. As if today wasn't exciting enough, Java 10 also shipped today! I know that all seems like enough already, but read on as we have a lot of good stuff this week!

• We want your feedback on this Spring Cloud Contract proposal to support fetching stubs over different protocols
• Spring Cloud Data Flow ninja Gunnar Hillert has just announced Spring Cloud Data Flow 1.4.0. The new release includes improved dashboards, versioned streams, a new stream deployment builder, support for Docker compose, security improvements, proxy server support for the shell, LDAP Role Mapping support and improved documentation, among other things. This is a massive release with a lot of good stuff, so don't miss it!
• Spring Security and OAuth-ninja Joe Grandja has just released Spring Security OAuth 2.3.0 which now supports Elliptic Curve signature verification in JwkTokenStore, among other things.
• Micrometer project lead Jon Schneider gives an amazing introduction to all things Micrometer in this blog. Seriously, go read it. Micrometer is the metrics collection facade that underpins the /actuator/events endpoint in Spring Boot 2+. It is not tied to Spring or Spring Boot, though, and this post is well worth a read no matter what your technical stack.
• Spring Cloud co-founder Spencer Gibb has been toying with integrating Retrofit, as a sort of alternative to using something like Feign. This is a work-in-progress example, but feedback is always valuable and it's exciting to see what might be coming
• Spring Cloud Open Service Broker lead Scott Frederick has just announced Spring Cloud Open Service Broker 2.0.0.M1. This new release has a Spring Boot 2 baseline, supports both Spring MVC and Spring WebFlux, and provides improved Spring Boot auto-configuration. If you're building service brokers for Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes, you're going to want to see this post
• This is a must-read article by Spring Web team ninja Rossen Stoyanchev on the choice between Servlet APIs and reactive APIs for Spring users in Spring MVC and Spring WebFlux: "Spring MVC or Spring WebFlux, which should you use? A perfectly valid question, but one that sets up an unsound dichotomy"
• Java 10 is here! Congrats to the Java team! Get it while its hot! This is the first release to support local type inference (var).
• The SivaLabs blog continues their look at microservices in Part 6, Distributed Tracing with Spring Cloud Sleuth and Zipkin
• The Trampoline project has been updated to support Spring Boot 2.0
• Asim Aslam likes Project Riff, the function-as-a-service offering from Pivotal. You might, too.
• IBM executive Eric Andersen, tweeting from the IBM Think 2018 event, looks forward to some of the exciting opportunities for Cloud Foundry and the Istio proxy.
• Dhiraj Ray has a nice post over on the Java Code Geeks blog on how to externalize configuration in a Spring application
• Spring Cloud Contract lead Marcin Grzejszczak tweets that, thanks to Olga Maciaszek, you can now understand Spring Cloud Contract in 3 seconds or 3 minutes. There's also a ten minutes version and a roughly five day version
• Dan Newton has a nice post looking at using the new reactive web runtime Spring WebFlux
• The SivaLabs series on building microservices with Spring Cloud looks, in this fifth post, on at using Spring Cloud Zuul
• Robert Winkler has just released Resilience4j 0.12.0 which upgrades Vavr from Spring Boot from 1.4.3.RELEASE to 1.5.5.RELEASE, among many other dependencies. It also adds a reset method to Circuit Breaker, adds a disable and force_open states to Circuit Breaker, adds Project Reactor support for circuit breaker, bulkhead and rate limiter, adds support for Micrometer, and ensures that the Reactor operators can be used together on a Flux.
• Check out our latest post about Spring Boot 2.0 and Micrometer on Touk Team Blog
• Matt McCandless continues his look at using JHipster, which builds upon Spring Boot and Angular. Check it out!