Hi Spring fans! In this extra-long installment I talk with longtime friends and fellow developer advocates, Okta's Matt Raible and Google's James Ward. We talked about Java, Kotlin, Spring, cloud computing technologies, security, Go, paradigm changes, web frameworks past and present, Macromedia, Adobe, Scala, and a million more things! This was a ton of fun for me so I'm hoping you'll enjoy it too.

Google Developer Advocate James Ward on Twitter (@_jamesward) Okta Developer Advocate Matt Raible on Twitter (@mraible)

On behalf of the team and everyone that contributed, I am pleased to announce that the first milestone of Spring Boot 2.2 has been released and is available from our milestone repository. This release closes over 140 issues and pull requests.

Highlights of this first milestone include:

• Spring Data Moore M2
• Significantly faster binding of large numbers of configuration properties
• Opt-in support for lazy bean initialization (there will be more on this in a subsequent blog post)
• JMX is now disabled by default
• Numerous dependency upgrades
• Faster startup and lower memory footprint when using the Actuator
…

Surely there’s never been a better time to become a Java developer?

There are productivity tools available these days that would have been mind-blowing just five years ago.

Take Spring Boot for example. Many people reading this on the Spring website may be familiar with Spring Boot. But let’s take a moment to acknowledge its awesomeness.

Years ago, if you were going to use the Spring Framework in your application, you had to be OK with a certain amount of configuration toil creeping into your day. But it wasn’t nice friendly configuration like, (ah, actually, sorry, I can’t think of an example…

On behalf of the community, I am pleased to announce that the Service Release 1 (SR1) of the Spring Cloud Greenwich Release Train is available today. The release can be found in Maven Central. You can check out the Greenwich release notes for more information.

Notable Changes in the Greenwich Release Train

Spring Cloud Netflix

• Issues

Spring Cloud Stream

• Bug fixes

Spring Cloud Cloudfoundry

• Issues

Spring Cloud Commons

• Issues

Spring Cloud OpenFeign

• Added Spring Data pagable support
• Issues

Spring Cloud Task

• Bug fixes

Spring Cloud Sleuth

• Issues

Spring Cloud Aws

• Logging and formatting changes
…

On behalf of the Spring Data team, I'm pleased to announce the availability of the second milestone of the Moore release train.

Notable changes include:

• Support for Kotlin Coroutines in Spring Data MongoDB, Cassandra and Redis.
• Querydsl support for reactive repositories.
• Range type support for derived repository query methods using between for Spring Data MongoDB & Cassandra.
• exists projection in Neo4j repositories.
• Reactive repositories for Spring Data Elasticsearch.
• Pivotal Gemfire and Apache Geode upgrades.
• Upgrade to Spring HATEOAS 1.0 M1.
• ...and numerous features for the JDBC module like direct insert & update methods skipping the is new check.
…

This blog post is the first in a series of posts that aim at providing a deeper look into Reactor's more advanced concepts and inner workings.

It is derived from my Flight of the Flux talk, which content I found to be more adapted to a blog post format.

I'll update the table below with links when the other posts are published, but here is the planned content:

1. Assembly vs Subscription (this post)
2. Debugging caveats
3. Hopping Threads and Schedulers
4. Inner workings: work stealing
5. Inner workings: operator fusion

If you're missing an introduction to Reactive Streams and the basic concepts of Reactor, head out to the site's learning section and the reference guide…

The Spring Cloud Data Flow team is pleased to announce the release of 2.0 of Data Flow. Follow the Getting Started guides for running on Local, Cloud Foundry, and Kubernetes.

Hand in hand is the 2.0 release of Spring Cloud Skipper. The getting started section in the reference guide is the best place to start if you want to use Skipper separately from Data Flow.

Here are the highlights for Data Flow

• Stream deployment always delegates to Skipper

• Single server that runs on all supported platforms

• Launch tasks against multiple platforms

• UI improvements

• Standardize on OAuth2 and OpenID Connect for Security

• Revamped metrics and monitoring of deployed applications

• Updated analytics using micrometer

• Database migration support

• Update to Boot 2.1

• Update internals to use JPA

• Task/Job Execution and Performance improvements

…

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I’m happy to announce that Spring Initializr has been updated and is now available on start.spring.io.

A short history of Spring Initializr

The project started out as a minimal HTML form, letting you generate a Spring Boot application with a few options. It's been well received by the Spring community, so the team added new ways to interact with it, through the command-line or your favorite IDE.

After a while, we decided to work on a first revision of the UI. We simplified the form, leaving the essential parts front and center and pushing…

Dear Spring community, we’re proud to announce the first milestone of Spring HATEOAS 1.0. Spring HATEOAS has been in development for almost seven years now. What started as tiny extension to Spring MVC became the foundation for Spring Data REST later on and has served as a fundamental building block for hypermedia based APIs in Spring MVC applications.

We received a lot of input for more advanced features from the community and eventually decided that it was time to integrate those into the library. Also, we gained a significant amount of experience using the library in the wild and thought we…