Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As usual, we’ve got a lot to cover so let’s get to it! My friend Kenny Bastani and I will be doing a training for O’Reilly on the first and second of March introducing all things Spring, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud and Cloud Foundry — join us!

• Spring web ninja Rossen Stoyanchev just announced the the M5 milestone release of Spring 5, complete with support for a WebClient testing mechanism.
• Eric Bottard has just announced Spring Cloud Data Flow for Cloud Foundry 1.1.1, which includes stability improvements, better error handling, network call optimizations and better load performance characteristics.
• Pivotal’s own Chris Sterling explains Cloud Foundry’s new container-networking stack and how it applies to Spring Cloud-based applications.
• Reactor project lead Stephane Maldini just announced Reactor Aluminium SR1.
• Last week, continuing the Spring Tips series, I looked at how to use Spring Boot with Apache MyBatis, a technology that is commonly used in high-performance organizations like Chinese mega-merchant Alibaba.
• The Spring Boot team’s Madhura Bhave nd Phillip Webb did a great talk at DevNexus demystifying the inner workings of Spring Boot.
• I loved Adib Saikali’s look at consumer-driven contracts with Spring Cloud Contract at the amazing Toronto Spring User Group.
• This isn’t specific to Java or any particular technology, but it’s an interesting post on how to unit test database indexes. Be sure to read the comments, too.
• I was pointed to this post on Java 8’s CompletableFuture the other day. It’s an oldie-but-a-goodie.
• Are you using Neo4j and want to add some niceties to the Neo4j browser? Check out this project, Spoon, by Neo4j’s very own Michael Hunger.
• I loved this video introducing some of the highlights of the Spring Initializr in Apache NetBeans.
• Chris Richardson and Kenny Bastani gave a great talk on eventual consistency for distributed systems a few weeks ago, and it’s now available online.
• Spring Data ninja Mark Paluch gave an awesome talk introducing secret management with Hashicorp’s Vault, and the talk is now available online.