Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in sunny London for Devoxx UK where I'll be talking to developers about building cloud-native applications with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and Cloud Foundry. As usual, if you're in the area, hit me up. The big news this week is the Spring XD 1.2 GA blowing the doors off performance numbers! No benchmarketing here, everything is published and reproducible: Performance turning to get ~12 MILLION msg/sec with an in-memory transport and 2.6MILLION msg/sec when using Kafka (100 byte messages). Lots more detail in the …

Spring Boot 1.3 will ship with a brand new module called spring-boot-devtools. The aim of this module is to try and improve the development-time experience when working on Spring Boot applications.

To use the module you simply need to add it as a dependency in your Maven POM:

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-devtools</artifactId>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

or your Gradle build file:

dependencies {
    compile("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-devtools")
}

Once included, the spring-boot-devtools module provides a number of nice features that we cover below (If you can't be bother to read the text, skip to the end of the post for a short video…

Dear Spring community,

The Spring team hereby announces that the Spring Framework 3.2.x line will reach End-Of-Life status at the end of 2016 (along with Apache Tomcat 6.x). We keep publishing occasional 3.2.x maintenance releases up until that point and will then end the branch.

Please prepare for upgrading to Spring Framework 4.x in time. The current Spring Framework 4 generation will remain in active maintenance until 2019, based on the upcoming 4.3 feature release next year - similar to the extended life that 3.2.x is in at the moment.

FYI, we expect Spring Framework 5.0 to be generally available by Q4 2016, requiring JDK 8+. If you need to stay on JDK 6 or 7, Spring Framework 4.x…

Over the past year, we have significantly improved the cache abstraction, with support of JSR-107 (JCache) annotations and a better declarative model to share or externalize common settings. In Spring Boot 1.3, we now offer a comprehensive auto-configuration for it.

In a nutshell, the cache abstraction applies caching to methods, thus reducing the number of executions based on the information available in the cache. The caching logic is applied transparently: the method below will only be invoked if the specified ISBN is not already present in the books cache. Upon calling that method for a missing Book, the caches will be updated transparently so that a further call does not invoke the…

This post is a guest post by community member Tadaya Tsuyukubo (@ttddyy), creator of the Spring Social Slideshare project. Thanks Tadaya! I’d like to see more of these guest posts, so - as usual - don’t hesitate to ping me! -Josh

Spring Social Evernote is one of the community modules in the Spring Social ecosystem. It is a service provider implementation for Evernote. It allows developers to work with the Evernote SDK for Java with idiomatic Spring idioms.

Evernote takes a unique approach for providing their APIs to developers. They have created language specific SDKs based on Thrift serialization format. Dave Engberg, CTO of Evernote, explained the motivations for choosing Thrift in this blog…

I am pleased to announce that Spring Data GemFire now has support for Apache Geode.

What is Apache Geode?

In a nutshell, Apache Geode is the open source core of Pivotal GemFire. Geode was recently accepted into the Apache incubator after being submitted by Pivotal to the Apache Software Foundation as part of the BDS open sourcing effort.

Technically, Apace Geode is an in-memory, distributed database (a.k.a. IMDG) enabling new as well as existing Spring/Java applications to operate at cloud scale with high availability and predictable latency without sacrificing consistency. Applications are able to transact and analyze Big Data in realtime to achieve…

I'm pleased to announce that Spring Boot v1.3.0.M1 is available now from the Spring milestone repository. This release builds on Spring Framework 4.2.0.RC1 and provides a number of improvements and new features over Spring Boot 1.2. Highlights include:

• A new spring-boot-devtools module with support for automatic restart, LiveReload and remote update.
• Extensive caching support for EhCache, Hazelcast, Infinispan, Redis, Guava or any compliant JSR-107 (JCache) implementation. Cache metric information is now also exposed via the actuator (when the underlying technology supports it).
• Improved metrics support, include export and aggregation features and big performance improvements if you're using Java 8.
• Fully executable JARs for Linux based operating systems, including "service" support. Starting a Boot application as a Linux service is now as easy as typing: sudo ln -s /var/myapp/myapp.jar /etc/init.d/myapp…

We are pleased to announce the Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.2 GA release.

The most important changes/enhancements in the Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.2 version are:

• Remove support for running with JDK 6, Java 7 or later is now required
• Improvements to the HDFS writer to support syncable writes and a new timeout option
• Improvements in the HBase support - adding PUT and DELETE to HbaseTemplate
• Add support for Pivotal HD 3.0
• Update Cloudera CDH 5 to use version 5.3.3
• Update Hortonworks HDP 2.2 version to 2.2.4.0
• Update Kite SDK to version 1.0
• Update Spring project versions to the latest

We continue…

As you might have gathered from my Java EE 7 blog post, we are planning for a Spring Framework 5.0 generation with a 2016 availability horizon. We'll be tracking JDK 9's release candidates then since one of our key themes is comprehensive JDK 9 support.

The feature planning for Spring 5 is still in the works. We are going to present a more in-depth plan at SpringOne this year, so stay tuned! Nevertheless, I would like to take this opportunity to reach out to you for feedback about our intended system requirements:

We will definitely raise our minimum to JDK 8+. This is a prerequisite since it…