Hi, Spring fans! In this installment, Josh Long (@starbuxman) looks at the latest and greatest in Spring Boot 3 AOT, then talks to Google's Josh Suereth (@jsuereth) about observability with OpenTelemetry, building better build tools, and so much more.

Want to learn more about Spring Boot and the wider ecosystem? SpringOne 2022 is almost here! If you want a chance to learn from the source, I hope you’ll join us 6-8 December 2022, right here in my hometown of San Francisco, my favorite west coast city in the USA. (Psst.: If you register now, there’s a $200 discount from the pass price with this…

On behalf of the team and all contributors, I am pleased to announce that Spring Batch 5.0.0-M8 is now available from our milestone repository.

In this milestone, we introduced two main changes:

• New default execution context serialization format
• SystemCommandTasklet enhancements

This blog post walks through these two major changes in details. For the complete list of changes, please check the release notes.

New default execution context serialization format

In this milestone release, the DefaultExecutionContextSerializer was updated to serialize/deserialize the context to/from Base64.

Moreover, the default ExecutionContextSerializer configured by @EnableBatchProcessing or DefaultBatchConfiguration was changed from JacksonExecutionContextStringSerializer to DefaultExecutionContextSerializer. The dependency to Jackson was made optional. In order to use the JacksonExecutionContextStringSerializer, jackson-core…

Dear Spring community,

It is my pleasure to announce that a feature-complete Spring Framework 6.0 release candidate is available now! We are expecting a further release candidate in time for the first Spring Boot 3.0 release candidate next week, and then our final releases for general availability in November.

As a major revision of the core framework, 6.0 RC1 comes with a Java 17+ baseline, a move to Jakarta EE 9+ (in the jakarta namespace superseding the former javax based EE APIs), and a broader infrastructure revision. This provides access to the latest web containers such as Tomcat 10 / Jetty 11 and the latest persistence providers such as Hibernate ORM 6.1 - all of which are exclusively available with the jakarta-namespaced variants of the Servlet API and JPA. It also sets the stage for the further evolution of those…

The Spring Observability Team has been working on adding observability support for Spring Applications for quite some time, and we are pleased to inform you that this feature will be generally available with Spring Framework 6 and Spring Boot 3!

What is observability? In our understanding, it is "how well you can understand the internals of your system by examining its outputs". We believe that the interconnection between metrics, logging, and distributed tracing gives you the ability to reason about the state of your system in order to debug exceptions and latency in your applications. You can watch more about what we think observability is in this episode of Enlightning with Jonatan Ivanov…

Project Loom has made it into the JDK through JEP 425. It’s available since Java 19 in September 2022 as a preview feature. Its goal is to dramatically reduce the effort of writing, maintaining, and observing high-throughput concurrent applications.

Where Virtual Threads make sense

This makes lightweight Virtual Threads an exciting approach for application developers and the Spring Framework. Past years indicated a trend towards applications that communicate over the network with each other. Many applications make use of data stores, message brokers, and remote services. I/O-intensive applications are the primary ones that benefit from Virtual Threads if they were built to use blocking I/O facilities such as InputStream and synchronous HTTP, database, and message broker clients. Running such workloads on Virtual Threads…

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! I write this installment as I pack and prepare for my trip to Antwerp, Belgium, for the always-amazing Devoxx show in Antwerp, Belgium. I've so missed this show over the pandemic and am so looking forward to returning. I hope to catch any and all of you there, too! I'll be copresenting with my pal James Ward about some of the new and novel in Spring Boot 3 and Kotlin. It's going to be awesome - join us and we'll have some fun together!

Now, we've got a ton to cover so let's dive right into it!

• Spring Tips: Spring Boot & Apache Kafka
• Spring Batch 5.0.0-M7 available now!
• Spring Cloud 2022.0.0-M5 is now available
• Spring Shell 2.1.2 and 3.0.0-M1 are now available
• The State of Spring Survey
• I put the updated code for my latest incarnation of Cloud Native Java - online in Github cloud-native-java-2022/e2e5
• A Bootiful Podcast: Spring and Java community legend Marten Deinum
• Difference Between Flux and Mono in Project Reactor
• Hey - Baeldung.com (yes, that Baeldung.com!) is using Spring, and they're looking for a Java Team Lead with Spring Experience (Remote) (Part Time)
• …

Here are the results of the survey (which is now closed): https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/ebooks/the-state-of-spring-2022. Thank you for your participation.

The State of Spring survey is here! Please give us your feedback by going to spring.io/survey. Spread the word by sharing these posts on Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other social platform you use!

Spring fans, our annual survey of the Spring community is back! Last year, we dived into the biggest projects and the most popular app patterns built with Spring, and a whole lot more! You told us your views about Spring Native, Data, and what…

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment of Spring Tips, I look at the venerable Apache Kafka broker and its integrations at various level of abstraction in the Spring Boot ecosystem.

Want to learn more about event driven architectures, AOT and GraalVM, Apache Kafka, and Spring Boot? SpringOne 2022 is almost here! If you want a chance to learn from the source, then I hope you’ll join us 6-8 December 2022, right here in my hometown of San Francisco, my favorite west coast city in the USA. (Psst.: If you register now, there’s a $200 discount from the pass price with this code S1VM22_Advocate_200.)

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment, Josh Long (@starbuxman) talks to longtime Spring community member and legend Marten Deinum (@mdeinum) about scuba diving, software, Spring, community, and more.

Also: I fixed the odd silence in the middle of the last few episodes! thanks for suffering through it with me. I have no idea what went wrong but I know now how to fix it

Want to meet more amazing people in our ecosystem, like Marten? SpringOne 2022 is almost here! I feel like it’s that anxious, exciting time before, sort of important holiday where you get given gifts! And with it, Spring Boot…