Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Stuttgart and Mainz, Germany and Paris, France, speaking to customers and at the JAX conference, then it's off to Paris, France, to speak at the Devoxx France edition. If you're around in any of these places don't hesitate to reach out I'd love to say hello.

Also, tonight, I'll be joining my friends from industry (Daniel Bryant, Markus Eisele, and Simon Maple) for the ZeroTurnaround webinar, Microservices for the Enterprise. There are already more than 3,000 people registered and I hope to see you there, as well!

As usual…

The latest milestone version of Spring Cloud is "Brixton.RC2" and it is available now from the usual repositories (details in the home page). This is a bugfix release building on the RC1, and there are no notable new features. If all goes well we'd like to get to a RELEASE in a week or two.

The Bigger Picture

Let's talk about Pivotal. Our ambition is to make business more agile, to reduce the time around the innovation loop; speed is the single biggest advantage an organization can have. Pivotal's main "product" is agility. This translates naturally into technology. Microservices are well-defined, small, easy-to-evolve, independently deployable batches of functionality. They lend themselves to rapid iteration because they're small. Spring Boot and the Spring ecosystem make short work of standing up new microservices and applications, and Spring Cloud handles the complexity in…

One of the nice things about working for Pivotal is that they have a great agile development division called Pivotal Labs. The teams within Labs are big proponents of Lean and XP software methodologies such as pair programming and test-driven development. Their love of testing has had a particular impact on Spring Boot 1.4 as we've started to get great feedback on things that could be improved. This blog post highlights some of the new testing features that have just landed in the latest M2 release.

Testing without Spring

The easiest way to unit test any Spring @Component is to not involve…

This is a cross-post blog from Simon BASLÉ from Couchbase. You can find him on twitter (@simonbasle) or github. Learn more about Couchbase and the Couchbase Java SDK on the developer portal.

Spring Boot 1.4.0 MILESTONE 2 is out! This is a good time to tell you about the joint effort between Spring Boot team members and the Couchbase Java SDK team to offer a first class integration of Couchbase into Spring Boot :)

In Spring Boot 1.4.0, Couchbase becomes a first class citizen of the Spring Boot ecosystem!

Couchbase SDK Integration

Spring Boot now directly recognizes when you have the Couchbase SDK in your classpath. And when that's the case, it instantiates a Cluster and a Bucket bean for you using autoconfiguration…

This article explains some of the dependency management tricks that can be used to create libraries and apps that depend on newer versions of a transitive dependency than that managed by a platform like Spring Boot or the Spring IO Platform. The examples below uses Reactor as an example of such a dependency because it is nearing a major new release (2.5.0) but existing dependency management platforms (Spring Boot 1.3.xq) declare a dependency on older versions (2.0.7). If you wanted to write an app that depended on a new version of Reactor through a transitive dependency on a library…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in wet and wonderful New York City. It's already almost tax-day here in the US! Whew! time is sure flying. Other (markedly more pleasant) annual landmarks will soon be here, including our big SpringOne Platform event, so book your tickets now!

Also, I'll be joining my friends Simon Maple, Daniel Bryant, and Markus Eisele for a webinar on microservices on April 19th - join us! It should be fun and - hopefully - interesting!

As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it!

• Spring Data Hopper went GA! This release includes 395 tickets closed and represents a substantial body of work! Get the bits and try it out now!
• Spring Integration and general messaging ninja Artem Bilan's just announced the first milestone in the Spring Integration Kafka 2.0 series. This release represents a complete rewrite of the support provided in Spring Kafka based on the Producer and Consumer APIs in Kafka 0.9x. Check it out, kick the tires and give feedback!
• Spring Cloud Stream lead Marius Bogoevici just announced Spring Cloud Stream 1.0RC2. This release includes support for the ObjectMapper…

Greetings Spring community,

Spring WS has just released version 2.3.0.RELEASE. This is a major upgrade where we have updated several core dependencies such as Apache Wss4j 2 (from 1.6). I recommend upgrading to ensure you have the latest fixes. For a listing of completed issues see the report below:

Release Notes | Project Page | GitHub | Issues | Documentation

The artifacts are staged on maven central, http://repo.spring.io/release, and bintray.

Cheers!

I just wanted to register here an experience that made me smile yesterday: making the rapidly improving Spring Cloud Data Flow wiggle from (Spring Boot) start(-ers) to service in a matter of minutes!

The only pre-requisite is that you have a Redis instance runnning. My Redis instance is running on 127.0.0.1 and it required no further configuration for Spring Boot to find and work with it.

We'll use the epic Spring Initializr to make short work of generating our applications. Remember those silly Apple commercials, "There's an App For That?" Nevermind that, there's a checkbox for that! Let's…