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…

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.

…

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! Here in the US it's the week of Thanksgiving, where - hopefully - we take a moment to note the many things for which we're thankful. I'm sure I speak for the whole team here at Pivotal when I say: we're thankful for you, dear community. Thank you.

And so, as usual, we've got a lot to get to it. All the better, in fact, for the lazy hours after turkey!

• Dr. Mark Pollack has just announced the release of Spring XD 1.3 GA and Spring Flo for Spring XD 1.0. This is a huge release! Spring XD 1.3.0 supports job composition DSLs, Spring Flo for Spring XD, an improved Admin UI, Spark 1.3.1, updates to the Spring Data and Spring for Hadoop distributions, a Cassandra Sink and much more! It is also the last in the line before Spring XD completes its journey to the archhitecture already partially laid out in Spring Cloud Stream and Spring Cloud Dataflow! This is an exciting evolution of the technology!
• Spring Security and Spring Session lead Rob Winch has just announced Spring Session 1.1.0.M1 complete with a lot of new features: searching HTTP sessions by username, HttpSessionListener support, customized Cookie creation, overriding the default RedisSerializer…

Today we are pleased to announce the general availability of Spring XD 1.3 and Flo for Spring XD 1.0.

• Spring XD 1.3 GA: zip, brew and rpm.
• Flo for Spring XD 1.0 GA: zip.

In addition to bug fixes we have also added several new features in the 1.3 release line

• Job Composition DSL allows for the creation of a complex graph of job executions.
• Flo for Spring XD designer supports creating composed jobs.
• Admin UI supports execution history of composed jobs.
• Cassandra Sink and Header Enricher Processor
• Gpfdist sink now supports update operations and full range of control file options
• Spark 1.3.1 Support
• A timeout value for flushing writes to HDFS in order to ensure data is persisted on the HDFS DataNode’s disks.
• General dependency upgrades, Spring Data Gosling, SI 4.2, and Boot 1.2
• …

My goodness the time has flown! We're already staring down the beginning of 2016!

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in beautiful Casablanca, Morocco for Devoxx Morocco! This is the fifth Devoxx this year - with events in Belgium, UK, France, Poland and now Morocco - and I have the rare honor of having spoken at all of them! #fullDevoxx

We've got a lot to cover this week so let's get to it!

• Spring Boot 1.3 has just been released! This is the most epic release of Spring Boot yet and I won't even try to do the release notes! Just go check it out and visit the Spring Initialzr
• Spring framework 4.2.3 has just been released!
• Netflix have just announced the open-sourcing of their build-and-bake pipeline for continuous delivery - project Spinnaker. It's interesting for lots of reasons, but one of them is that it's written using Spring Boot!
• I'll be coming to Washington DC with several of my cloudiest friends - join us!
• There's a new checkbox on the Spring Initializr to enable the Ratpack Spring Boot integration…

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Antwerp, Belgium for the grand mother of all Devoxxes (Devoxxen?), Devoxx Belgium! I'm here along with several members of the team and if you're around, don't hesitate to say hi!

• Dr. Mark Pollack has just announced the release of Spring XD 1.3RC1
• Stormpath, the cloud, and on-premise, identity provider as-a-service has put up an exhaustive blog on using their Spring Boot auto-configuration with Spring Security! This is a really cool integration. I hope people reward their hard work in striving for the most powerful, expressive, and convenient developer experience! Way to go!
• Check out this short-and-sweet article on DZone to learn about Spring Boot's auto-configuration mechanism
• The Spring framework Guru is back with a video tutorial …

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Sofia, Bulgaria for one of my favorite shows, the epic Java2Days event!

Last week saw the release (finally!) of Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.6, which contains more than a year and half of highly anticipated features and heavy lifting. The new release includes, among many other things, support for platform-managed GitLab, JFrog Artifactory, and CloudBees Jenkins CI; support for microservices infrastructure including the Spring Cloud Config Server, and Spring Cloud Eureka; and support for Docker container images and .NET applications; and support for running on Microsoft Azure. This release is packed with all sorts of features optimized for the continuous and safe delivery of software into production and I…