This Week in Spring — March 18th, 2016

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! What a crazy week it’s been since we last talked! I spent a day in San Francisco, Germany, Scotland, and Romania between Monday and Friday last. It’s nice this week to be in (warm!) southern California in Los Angeles and San Diego speaking to customers and at a couple of meetups! If you’re around, I hope you’ll join me for the Cloud Native Meetup here in Los Angeles (tonight!).

• The 2016 NFJS tour has just kicked off, first in Minneapolis. The amazing Craig Wallsand Matt Stine be presenting at most of the NFJS shows in 2016 on all manner of topics including Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Spring Security, Spring Data, Spring Cloud Data Flow, and (later this year) Spring’s new reactive stuff. Make sure to check out the event in your city!
• JUnit 5 is coming! Check out Lukas Eder’s quick runthrough of some of the new features in JUnit 5. JUnit 5 is critical infrastructure code, and it’s for this reason that we at Pivotal were happy to help sponsor some of its development.
• Get the details on the new JEP for type inference in Java
• Spring Integration lead Gary Russell has just announced Spring for Apache Kafka M1
• Every now and then people say Spring Boot has too much magic. (Invariably, others will complain it has too much boilerplate!) I think the key to demystifying Spring Boot’s capabilities is to understand its secret sauce, auto-confiuration, which is verycapably explained in this epic blog by our pal K. Siva Prasad Reddy. Also, undestand that you can start the application with --debug=true and you’ll see an enumeration of which auto-configuration conditionals are in play.
• project Reactor lead Stephane Maldini talks about how Reactor fits in with the larger reactive theme of Spring 5
• make sure to join Ratpack contributor Danny Hyun for an upcoming webinar introducing Ratpack and Spring Boot
• Make sure to join Spring Cloud Stream lead Marius Bogoevici for a webinar on stream processing in the cloud
• The incomparable Gunnar Hillert wrote a blog on how to use .jsp pages with embedded Spring Boot applications. He does this mainly to support migrating an existing application; not recommended for new applications!
• Want to write an Atlassian Connect application using Spring Boot?
• Apress has just published Pro Spring Boot — check it out!