Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's the week before SpringOne Platform and things are crazy! We have so much to cover - as usual! - but FIRST! ..some poetry (with apologies to Clement Clark Moore)

'twas the week before SpringOne Platform, when all throughout Spring; Not a creature was stirring, just the computers and things; the expectations were raised by the community with care; in hopes that SpringRod would be there;

That's right! this year is fixing to be AMAZING! We're going to have Spring founder Rod Johnson, Jenny Zhang, Siew Choo Soh, Neha Narkhede, Matt Raible, Ray Tsang, Lauren Knausenberger, Juergen Hoeller, Bruno Borges, Andrew Clay Shafer and allllll the rest of the Spring team! It feels like a minute ago (December!) that we just had the last one so I can't believe how quickly this one has arrived, but I can't wait!

Right now I'm bouncing between San Francisco, CA; Atlanta, GA; Columbus, GA; Los Angeles, CA and I'm enjoying the conferences and customers with whom I'm visiting but I'm really excited to be at SpringOne Platform and so counting down the days!

Just think? The next time I write this roundup, I'll be in Washington DC for SpringOne Platform 2018!

• Spring Cloud Data Flow 1.7 M1 released
• Introducing Spring Data JDBC
• Spring IO Platform lead Andy Wilkinson has just announced Spring IO Platform Cairo SR4
• Spring IO Platform Brussels SR13
• Spring Boot team lead Phil Webb just announced Spring Boot 2.1.M3, with kafka streams support, support for non-web OAuth applications, improved conversion service integration, and support for logging groups, among many other things
• In this 8th installment of an 8 part series, I looked at deploying Cloud Foundry based applications that use Google Cloud services via Spring Cloud GCP
• Andy Wilkinson also just announced Spring Boot 2.0.5
• Make sure you check out Jim Weaver's webinar, "Reactive Card Magic"
• Spring Boot 1.5.16
• Oleg Zhurakousky introduces the new Kotlin support in Spring Cloud Function
• Spring Security 5.0.8 and 4.2.8 Released
• This Week in Spring - September 11th, 2018
• https://twitter.com/springcloud/status/1042176703332802560
• this InfoQ mini-guide is pretty epic; it's a practical guide to building an API backend with Spring Boot
• JDK 11
• The spring.io/guides[http://Spring.io/guides] have been updated to the latest Spring Boot and Spring Cloud Finchley release!
• Save the date! the good Dr. Subramaniam and I are doing a joint talk introducing Kotlin Wednesday, January 16, 2019 at the San Francisco Java User Group - join us!
• Check out the latest InfoQ eMag, on the theme of testing, with an article from Spring Cloud lead Marcin Grzejszczak on an integration testing approach for communication between components. He reviews contract testing, and Spring Cloud Contract, as one solution.
• It's super cool that Pivotal is ranked #2 in terms of contributors to open source as a percentage of company employees. Go team and go OSS!
• Interesting post on InfoQ on the state of Java serialization