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…

Wow! Can you believe we're already staring down 2016? Time sure flies! Remember, This Week in Spring was started the first week of 2011, so we'll soon mark the fifth anniversairry of TWiS!

This week I'm in Shanghai, China, for the Cloud Foundry Summit Asia and then off to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA, for the Rich Web Experience! If you're in either place, don't hesitate to reach me!

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

• Spring Boot co-founder and Spring framework contributor Phil Webb put up a really thoughtful post helping people looking at Spring (which has been around for 10+ years) to avoid some of the common pitfalls facing new developers in 2016. A very recommended read!
• Florian Benz did a great job discussing the motivations and use of comprehensive REST documentation as generated with Spring Rest Docs. This is a really cool, quick read!
• Speaking of Spring Rest Docs, there's a great interview with the project lead, the amazing Andy Wilkinson who - in his ample free time - also manages the Spring IO Platform as well as contributes to Spring Boot. Read on to learn more about one of my heroes…

There are some new features in Spring Boot 1.3 to do with OAuth2 clients and servers and Spring Security OAuth2. Some of those features were ported from Spring Cloud Security and hence were in the Angel release train of Spring Cloud, but are not in the Brixton release train. This article helps you navigate the changes and update any existing apps to use the new features.

Dependency Management

If you are not using Spring Cloud you should be able to just change the version number of your Spring Boot dependency. Since some of the OAuth2 features migrated from Spring Cloud Security to Spring Boot in 1.3, it is likely that things are slightly more complicated than that. A separate article deals with upgrading Spring Cloud apps from Spring Boot 1.2 to 1.3. If you are using the Spring Cloud Angel release train then you should consult that…

Over the Thanksgiving weekend a 2014 article called "Why I hate Spring" by Sam Atkinson started doing the rounds on Twitter. It's always interesting to listen to criticisms to see what we can do to improve Spring, much of Spring Boot was born out of listening to people talk about the problems that they faced with the framework.

In this blog post, I'll try to address some of the concerns discussed in Sam's article, and describe my personal Spring "best practices". Before we get too much into the details though, it's worth considering why less than optimal ways of doing things still exist in the…

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!

There are some interesting new features in Spring Boot 1.3 that are now available in Spring Cloud in the Brixton release train. The Angel release train of Spring Cloud is partly incompatible with Spring Boot 1.3, so when you upgrade there are some important things to be aware of. This article helps you navigate the changes and update any existing apps to use the new features. It should also be helpful generally when trying to adopt new versions of Spring projects into existing codebases.

TIP: You can use mvn dependency:tree or gradle dependencies to list the dependencies in your project and check the versions.

…

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)
…