Hi Spring fans and welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in New York City for the Kafka Summit where I'll be joining the excellent Tim Berglund, head of developer experience at Confluent, and James Watters, SVP at Pivotal, to talk about why Pivotal and Confluent are better together. Join us! Then, next week it's off to South Africa (for the SpringOne Tour shows in Capetown and Johannesburg and then it's off to to Mauritius for the DevConf. If you're in any of those places, don't hesitate to say hi!.

LTR: Confluent co-founder Jay Kreps, Tim Berglund, me and Pivotal SVP James Watters

And without further ado, let's get to it!

• Spring Framework 5.1.6, 5.0.13 and 4.3.23 available now
• Spring Tools 4.2.0 released
• Last week on A Bootiful Podcast (@BootifulPodcast) I talked to Josh Mckenty about data sovereignty, microservices, Cloud Foundry, Python, the cloud, Pivotal, and more
• If you get one blog to read, read this one on the Reactor Debugging Experience. It's amazing!
• Spring Tool Suite 3.9.8 released
• Want to know what makes Pivotal Cloud Foundry the best place to run Spring Boot applications?
• Focus on Integration Tests Instead of Mock-Based Tests
• A gentle reminder that you should …

Hi Spring fans! In this week's installment of a Bootiful Podcast I, Josh Long, welcome Josh Mckenty - or "better Josh," as I affectionately call him - to the show to discuss Pivotal, Cloud Foundry, Python, microservices, and data sovereignty, among other things.

Josh McKenty (@jmckenty) on Twitter

In the Project Reactor team, we believe that the debugging experience of the libraries you rely upon is as important as, let's say, the feature set or performance.

Today, we're excited to announce two new experimental projects in the Reactor family!

BlockHound - a new kid on the block

One of the most common rookie mistakes is to block Java threads that are supposed to run only non-blocking code (e.g., Schedulers.parallel()).
It is one of the most harmful issues because you may block unrelated processing or even create a deadlock!

Consider the following code:

Flux.range(0, Runtime.getRuntime…

We are pleased to announce the first Milestone of the Spring Cloud Stream Germantown release train - Germantown.M1/2.2.0.M1.

Spring Cloud Stream Germantown 2.2.0.M1 is available for use in the Spring Milestone repository.

Some of the highlights:

Improved Home page and User Documentation

Please check out our new home page and user guide

Further functional programming enhancements

We've added additional functional programming enhancements and simplifications where you no longer required to provide @EnableBinding annotation and in some cases you may not need spring.cloud.stream.definition…

Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! I'm in Pleasanton, CA, visiting one of Pivotal's large customers, and then tomorrow it's off to New York City for my talk there at the Kafka Summit with the excellent Tim Berglund and James Watters. Join us! Then, next week it's off to South Africa (for the SpringOne Tour shows in Capetown and Johannesburg) and then it's off to Mauritius for the DevConf - if you're in any of those places, don't hesitate to say hi!.

Also, totally worth including that on Sunday Spring Framework marked the 15th anniversary of its release on…

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I'm happy to announce that Spring Initializr has been updated and is now available on start.spring.io.

UI changes - listening to your feedback

Following the last revision, the main feedback we received was about the missing list of dependencies. Some community members seemed to be looking at this list for information purposes (not necessarily using the website to generate a new app), while others would just like to see what's available.

While start.spring.io seems like a very simple service, generating applications with a simple HTML…

Hi Spring fans! In this week's installment Josh Long talks to AxonIQ's Steven van Beelen, lead of the Axon project, and Pivotal's Ben Wilcock, on CQRS, event-sourcing, event-storming, microservices, Spring Boot and the long camaraderie shared by Axon and Spring.

• Axon framework lead Steve van Beelen
• Pivotal product marketing manager Ben Wilcock
• Axon founder and AxonIQ CEO Allard Buijze
• AxonIQ

We are pleased to announce first milestone of the Spring Cloud Function - 2.1.0.M1.

Individual modules of Spring Cloud Function 2.1.0.M1 are available for use in the Spring Milestone repository. This release encompasses the following:

• Some of the features that has always been available in bean factory based function catalog are now part of the functional form (see Dave Syer's blog for more details on functional form) :
  • Multiple endpoint support - ability to map multiple HTTP endpoints the same way one would expect in conventional context configuration.
  • Function composition - ability to compose function (e.g., foo|bar or foo,bar).
• Ability to communicate and retain meta-information via Message headers for cases where Message function is composed with non-Message (e.g., Function<Message<?>>, Message<?>> is composed with Function<?, ?>…

Hi Spring fans! Welcome to yet another super-quick mid-season interregnum installment of Spring Tips where we look at super early/preliminary new R2DBC support for reactive MySQL in the Jasync SQL project.

Josh Long (@starbuxman)