This Week in Spring: SpringOne Platform, Spring Cloud, and New Releases

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's the week before SpringOne Platform and things are crazy! We have so much to cover  —as usual — but first, it's time for some poetry (with apologies to Clement Clark Moore):

'twas the week before SpringOne Platform, when all throughout Spring;
Not a creature was stirring, just the computers and things;
the expectations were raised by the community with care;
in hopes that SpringRod would soon be there;

That's right! This year is fixing to be AMAZING! We're going to have Spring founder, Rod Johnson, Jenny Zhang, Siew Choo Soh, Neha Narkhede, Matt Raible, Ray Tsang, Lauren Knausenberger, Juergen Hoeller, Bruno Borges, Andrew Clay Shafer, and the rest of the Spring team! It feels like just a little bit (December!) that we just had the last one, so I can't believe how quickly this one has arrived, but I can't wait!

Right now, I'm bouncing between San Francisco, CA; Atlanta, GA; Columbus, GA; Los Angeles, CA, and I'm enjoying the conferences and customers with whom I'm visiting, but I'm really excited to be at SpringOne Platform and am counting down the days!

Just think! The next time I write this roundup, I'll be in Washington D.C. for SpringOne Platform 2018! Without further ado, let's get to it!

• Spring Cloud Data Flow 1.7 M1 has been released.
• Introducing Spring Data JDBC!
• Spring IO Platform lead, Andy Wilkinson, has just announced Spring IO Platform Cairo SR4.
• Spring IO Platform Brussels SR13 — click here to learn more!
• Spring Boot team lead, Phil Webb, just announced Spring Boot 2.1.M3 with Kafka streams support, support for non-web OAuth applications, improved conversion service integration, and support for logging groups — among many other things!
• In this 8th installment of an 8 part series, I looked at deploying Cloud Foundry-based applications that use Google Cloud services via Spring Cloud GCP.
• Andy Wilkinson also just announced Spring Boot 2.0.5.
• Make sure you check out Jim Weaver's webinar, "Reactive Card Magic."
• Spring Boot 1.5.16 — check out this version!
• Oleg Zhurakousky introduces the new Kotlin support in Spring Cloud Function.
• Spring Security 5.0.8 and 4.2.8 have been released.
• Check out last weeks installment to learn what you missed — This Week in Spring - September 11th, 2018.
• Click here for the latest Twitter status from Spring Cloud.
• This InfoQ mini-guide is pretty epic; it's a practical guide to building an API backend with Spring Boot.
• The spring.io/guides[http://Spring.io/guides] have been updated to the latest Spring Boot and Spring Cloud Finchley release!
• Save the date! The good Dr. Subramaniam and I are doing a joint talk introducing Kotlin on Wednesday, January 16, 2019, at the San Francisco Java User Group — come join us!
• Check out the latest InfoQ eMag on the theme of testing, with an article from Spring Cloud lead, Marcin Grzejszczak, on an integration testing approach for communication between components. He reviews contract testing and the Spring Cloud Contract as one solution.
• It's super cool that Pivotal is ranked #2 in terms of contributors to open source as a percentage of company employees. Go team and go OSS!
• Here is an interesting post from InfoQ on the state of Java serialization.