I am pleased to announce that Gradle dependency management plugin 0.5.4.RELEASE is now available from Maven Central, JCenter, and the Gradle Plugin Portal.

This maintenance release includes a significant improvement in the performance of applying Maven-style exclusions to your Gradle builds. The change provides a 20x speed up, reducing the overhead, even with very complex dependency graphs, to 50ms or less.

For more information about how the plugin can improve your Gradle builds, please read the introductory blog post.

I’m pleased to announce the availability of Spring Cloud Connectors 1.2.1. This is a maintenance release with a few new features and a few bug fixes.

Here are the highlights:

Heroku Connector

Relational Databases

• The Heroku cloud connector now recognizes the DATABASE_URL environment variable when detecting PostgreSQL database.

Redis

• Heroku Redis is now supported.

Spring Connector

Relational Databases

• When creating a DataSource, Spring Cloud Connectors will look for a pooling DataSource implementation on the classpath and choose one based on a default priority. The priority of detection has been changed to more closely match the order used in Spring Boot.
• Applications can customize the priority order of pooled DataSource implementations using either Java configuration or XML configuration.
• DataSourceConfig will now accept a map of key/value pairs to allow setting arbitrary properties of the created DataSource. This allows overriding of the default JDBC driver class name and validation query set up by Connectors, in addition to other properties of the DataSource…

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 3.7.2 release of the Spring Tool Suite, our Eclipse-based tooling.

STS 3.7.2 focuses on fixing existing issues and updating STS to work with the latest updates on Cloud Foundry, Spring, and the various Spring projects.

The list of fixed issues include:

• Spring Boot Dashboard now works with the new Diego runtime on Cloud Foundry
• Spring Boot 1.3.0 compatibility (due to updated spring components inside)
• quick text search can now search for escaped * and ? characters
• preliminary support for Eclipse Buildship (the new Gradle integration for Eclipse from Gradleware)

To download the distributions, please go visit:

• Spring Tool Suite: https://spring.io/tools/sts/all

Detailed new and noteworthy notes can be found here: STS 3.7.2 New & Noteworthy.

STS 3.7.3 is scheduled to ship in early March 2016.

Enjoy!

Dear Spring Community,

I'm pleased to announce the availability of Spring Social 1.1.4.RELEASE. This includes the Spring Social Core, Web, Security, and Config modules.

This is a maintenance release, addressing a handful of bugs and introducing a few minor improvements (many of which were submitted as pull requests from our wonderful open-source community...thanks!). View the changelog for full details.

Project Site | Reference | JavaDoc

We are pleased to announce the 1.2 release of the Spring Data JDBC Extensions project. This release updates the Querydsl dependency to 3.6.9 and adds an option to retrieve SearchResults using the QueryDslTemplate. See changelog for 1.2.1.RELEASE.

We are also pleased to announce the first milestone of the 2.0 version of the Spring Data JDBC Extensions project. The big changes for this release are:

• change to building with Java 7 or later
• upgrading the Oracle JDBC to version 12.1.0.2
• updating any dependencies to follow Spring IO Platform 2.0 including Spring Framework 4.2
• removing the Querydsl SQL support in this version (see below)
…

We’re pleased to announce a first maintenance release of Spring Statemachine 1.0.1. Artifacts are available either from Maven Central or from Spring Repository.

Changes in version 1.0.1 (2015-11-18)

• autoStart via @EnableStateMachineFactory doesn't work [#113]
• Update to framework 4.2.2 [#115]
• Association with @EnableStateMachine and @WithStateMachine [#116]
• EnableStateMachineFactory fails when there are 2 state machine configurations [#117]
• PersistStateMachineHandler returning event outcome [#118]
• NPE with missing configurer [#119]
• Context events not working with StateMachineBuilder [#120]

Spring IO Platform 2.0.0.RELEASE is now available from the Spring release repository and Maven Central.

Additions:

• Spring REST Docs 1.0

Major upgrades:

• Reactor 2.0
• Spring Security 4.0

Minor upgrades:

• Spring AMQP 1.5
• Spring Boot 1.3
• Spring Cloud Connectors 1.2
• Spring Data Gosling
• Spring Framework 4.2
• Spring HATEOAS 0.19
• Spring Integration 4.2

A number of other Spring projects and their dependencies have also been updated to their latest maintenance releases.

Please note that a number of dependencies that were previously part of the Platform have been removed or replaced in this release. Please refer to the documentation…

On behalf of the community, I'm pleased to announce the release of Spring Session 1.1.0.M1. The release can be found in the Spring Milestone Repository (https://repo.spring.io/milestone/).

This release contains lots of fixes and new features. You can find a complete list in the changelog. The highlights have been included below:

• Support for search for session by username
• Support Customize Cookie Creation. Thanks to everyone who provided PRs and feedback for this feature!
• Add HttpSessionListener support
• Allow override default RedisSerializer
• Added comprehensive Hazelcast and configuration support. Thanks @_mark_a and @tommyludwig!
• Performance improvements
• Allow scoping the session in Redis using redisNamespace. Thanks fstegmann!
• Add ExpiringSession.setLastAccessedTime(long)
…

One behalf of the Spring Boot team, and everyone that has contributed, I am pleased to announce that Spring Boot 1.3.0 has been released and is available now from repo.spring.io, Maven Central and Bintray. This release adds a significant number of new features and improvements and builds on the latest release of the Spring Framework. For full upgrade instructions and "new and noteworthy" features please see the release notes.

Here are some of the highlights of v1.3:

Developer Tools

A new spring-boot-devtools module has been added which aims to improve the development-time experience. The…