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…

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 3.7.2 release of the Spring Tool Suite, our Eclipse-based tooling.

STS 3.7.2 focuses on fixing existing issues and updating STS to work with the latest updates on Cloud Foundry, Spring, and the various Spring projects.

The list of fixed issues include:

• Spring Boot Dashboard now works with the new Diego runtime on Cloud Foundry
• Spring Boot 1.3.0 compatibility (due to updated spring components inside)
• quick text search can now search for escaped * and ? characters
• preliminary support for Eclipse Buildship (the new Gradle integration for Eclipse from Gradleware)

To download the distributions, please go visit:

• Spring Tool Suite: https://spring.io/tools/sts/all

Detailed new and noteworthy notes can be found here: STS 3.7.2 New & Noteworthy.

STS 3.7.3 is scheduled to ship in early March 2016.

Enjoy!

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.

…

Dear Spring Community,

I'm pleased to announce the availability of Spring Social 1.1.4.RELEASE. This includes the Spring Social Core, Web, Security, and Config modules.

This is a maintenance release, addressing a handful of bugs and introducing a few minor improvements (many of which were submitted as pull requests from our wonderful open-source community...thanks!). View the changelog for full details.

Project Site | Reference | JavaDoc

We are pleased to announce the 1.2 release of the Spring Data JDBC Extensions project. This release updates the Querydsl dependency to 3.6.9 and adds an option to retrieve SearchResults using the QueryDslTemplate. See changelog for 1.2.1.RELEASE.

We are also pleased to announce the first milestone of the 2.0 version of the Spring Data JDBC Extensions project. The big changes for this release are:

• change to building with Java 7 or later
• upgrading the Oracle JDBC to version 12.1.0.2
• updating any dependencies to follow Spring IO Platform 2.0 including Spring Framework 4.2
• removing the Querydsl SQL support in this version (see below)
…

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…

We’re pleased to announce a first maintenance release of Spring Statemachine 1.0.1. Artifacts are available either from Maven Central or from Spring Repository.

Changes in version 1.0.1 (2015-11-18)

• autoStart via @EnableStateMachineFactory doesn't work [#113]
• Update to framework 4.2.2 [#115]
• Association with @EnableStateMachine and @WithStateMachine [#116]
• EnableStateMachineFactory fails when there are 2 state machine configurations [#117]
• PersistStateMachineHandler returning event outcome [#118]
• NPE with missing configurer [#119]
• Context events not working with StateMachineBuilder [#120]

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
• …

Spring IO Platform 2.0.0.RELEASE is now available from the Spring release repository and Maven Central.

Additions:

• Spring REST Docs 1.0

Major upgrades:

• Reactor 2.0
• Spring Security 4.0

Minor upgrades:

• Spring AMQP 1.5
• Spring Boot 1.3
• Spring Cloud Connectors 1.2
• Spring Data Gosling
• Spring Framework 4.2
• Spring HATEOAS 0.19
• Spring Integration 4.2

A number of other Spring projects and their dependencies have also been updated to their latest maintenance releases.

Please note that a number of dependencies that were previously part of the Platform have been removed or replaced in this release. Please refer to the documentation…