Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! In the last week I went from Germany (for JAXON) to Linz, Austria (for DevOne) and Vienna, Austria (for a meetup) and now I'm in Melbourne, Australia (after a 10 hour stopover in Bangkok, Thailand), for the VOXXED Melbourne event. As usual, if you're around I'd love to hear from you!

Without further ado, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it!

• Pivotal just turned 5! Happy birthday to us!
• Spring Cloud contributor Ryan Baxter has just announced Spring Cloud Finchley RC1. The new release is packed with all sorts of new stuff and represents one of hopefully the final releases before Spring Cloud Finchley before it's GA
• Hi Spring fans! In last week's installment of Spring Tips I looked at how to extricate process state - valuable for coordinating long running or mutli-actor processes - from business logic with Spring Statemachine
• the RabbitMQ 3.7.5-beta2 is now available.
• I really like this Chinese-language post on whether Spring Boot and Spring Cloud can be used by small and medium-sized companies
• The RabbitMQ blog has a nice post on using the Micrometer integration in the RabbitMQ Java client to integrate with Datadog
• Jeroen Reijn gave a nice presentation on test-driven Spring REST Docs-based documentation
• The Ordina blog has a nice post on using Spring Cloud Contract to support consumer-driven contracts.
• I love this post by Gaurav Gupta on synchronous request/reply with Apache Kafka and Spring
• The Baeldung has another interesting post (related to Servlets) that looks at the @ServletComponentScan in Spring Boot: it detects all Servlet API WebFilter, WebListener, and WebServlet annotations on servlet components.
• This is an oldie-but-a-goodie from the Baeldung blog: a Quick Intro to the SpringBootServletInitializer, which is the mechanism that let's Spring Boot applications run in a Servlet container setup, as opposed to a fat-.jar.
• Do not miss this new guide on Spring Cloud Gateway
• Bartosz Jedrzejewski put together a nice post on using Reactor (in a Spring WebFlux application) to obtain parallelism and backpressure
• And yet another Baeldung post, this time with a review of the state of Java. The numbers in this year's survey are very interesting! The numbers are very promising: Java 8 is now, by far, the majority deployed version of Java. Java 9 and 10 are gaining ground, though! Also interesting: Spring Framework 4 and Spring Framework 5 are are, by far, the majority deployed enterprise Java framework. The precise numbers aren't clear, but it looks to be almost 75% of the pie-chart. Java EE and "Other" technologies account for what I'd guess is 20% of the remaining deployments, followed by Spring Framework 3, which looks to be about 5% or so (Maybe less?) Of the deployments that are based on Spring, a majority are based on Spring Boot, with less than 20% or so based on Spring without Spring Boot. IntelliJ, Apache Tomcat, and Maven are the clear leaders, too. Also interesting: Groovy, Kotlin and Scala (in that order) are the leaders in non-Java languages.
• The Heroku documentation has a great list of steps that are required to make a Spring Boot application cloud-ready. This blog was published on the Heroku blog but a lot of it applies to building cloud-native applications for any platform
• This post demonstrates how to test in a Spring application without Spring. It sets up a scenario that should be very uncommon, field injection, and demonstrates how adversely this affects the goals of testing. Remember what I always say: "every time you do field injection, a unit test dies!" The post then looks at how to test components, and to even remove Spring from the testing process.
• Nicolas Frankel looks at changes in Spring Boot 2's Actuator
• I love this cheat sheet on using Java 10
• The Spring Cloud team is hiring! Join us!
• Michael Simons and Michael Plöd put together a nice German-language slidedeck on Spring Boot 2
• The All and Sundry blog has a nice post on configuring a simple route with Spring Cloud Gateway
• Part two of my series on building reactive Spring-based applications is now available in Java Magazine
• The Java Revisited blog has a nice post on the motivations for pursuing certification in Spring Cloud
• The call-for-papers for the inaugural RabbitMQ Summit on November 12th, 2018 at CodeNode in London, UK is now open!