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…

Dear Spring Community,

On behalf of Spring Integration Team, I'm glad to announce that Spring Integration AWS 1.0.0.M1 is available now for download from the Spring milestone repository.

Since the 0.5.0 pre-release version we have fully reworked the core bits for simpler programming model and introduced new components. Currently the Spring Integration AWS is based on the Spring Cloud AWS project at its foundation.

Thank you to all who have contributed to this milestone!

Highlights of this Milestone include:

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Adapters

• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) Adapters

• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) Adapters

…

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…

Spring Boot v1.4.0.M2 is available now from the Spring milestone repository. This is an absolutely massive release, closing over 180 issues and pull requests! Thanks to everyone that has contributed.

Highlights of the new release include:

• ASCII Art banners generated from image files (gif,jpg or png).
• Easier JsonSerializer and JsonDeserializer registration with @JsonComponent.
• Couchbase support.
• Neo4J support
• Narayana transaction manager support.
• Upgrades to Spring Framework 4.3, Hibernate 5.1, Jackson 2.7, Solr 5.5, Spring Data Hopper, Spring Session 1.2 & Hazelcast 3.6.
• A massive overhaul of testing support including a new unified @SpringBootTest annotation, @MockBean and @SpyBean support, JSON AssertJ support and auto-configuration for tests.
…

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…

Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2015. Speaker: Matt Raible Core Spring track Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/SpringCentral/noxml-eliminating-xml-in-your-spring-projects

Many Spring projects exist that leverage XML for their configuration and bean definitions. Most Java web applications use a web.xml to configure their servlets, filters and listeners. This session shows you how you can eliminate XML by configuring your Spring beans with JavaConfig and annotations. It also shows how you can remove your web.xml and configure your web components with Java.