This Week in Spring: Announcements Galore, Spring Cloud Contracts, and Integrating the Database

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! We’ve got a lot to cover this week, so let’s get to it! This week I’m in San Francisco and New York City talking to developers and toiling on the final edits to the O’Reilly book Cloud Native Java (almost there!).

• Spring Cloud Task ninja Glen Renfro just announced Spring Cloud Task 1.1.1.
• our latest and greatest Spring Boot team member Madhura Bhave just announced Spring Boot 1.5.0.RC1.
• Spring Integration guru Artem Bilan just announced Spring Integration 5.0.M2.
• Spring Batch and Spring Cloud Task lead Michael Minella just announced Spring Batch 4.0 complete with a lot of niceties and — in particular, a feature I’ve wanted forever — an easy way to build instances of the more sophisticated ItemReader and ItemWriter instances, including the FlatFileItemReader! This is been a long time in coming and I can’t wait for this release. This rounds out the already epic Java configuration story for Spring Batch.
• Spring IO Platform lead Andy Wilkinson just announced Spring IO Platform Athens SR2, which brings with it new revisions of Spring Boot, Spring Retry, Spring AMQP, and so much more.
• Spring framework ninja and Kotlin aficionado Sebastien Deleuze just blogged about some of the coming improvements to support the Kotlin language in Spring framework 5.
• Pivotal’s very own Ben Wilcock put together a very nice example project that demonstrates how to use Spring Cloud Services with Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
• He also put together a handy demo of Spring Cloud Contracts.
• Our very own Toshiaki Maki Making put together a nice post on some of the niceties in Spring Boot 1.5 and how they integrate with the Pivotal Apps Manager for Cloud Foundry.
• Daniel Olszewski has put together a quick and easy look at configuring time-to-live values for the Spring Cache abstraction.
• I liked this German-language post on building REST services with Spring Boot
• Jose Praveen did a nice job demonstrating how to integrate an H2 database with a Spring Boot application.
• I liked Sam Chu’s Chinese-language post on setting up multiple MongoDB connections in a Spring application.
• This is a well-thought out look at how to do validation of JSON payloads in a REST API.