This Week in Spring: Spring Boot, Releases, and Cloud

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week, I’m in Paris, France, for the amazing Voxxed Microservices event. This has been quite the show, and I’m grateful for having had the opportunity to attend. Now, as I write this, I’m preparing to go to Beijing, China, for the first leg in Asia of the SpringOne Tour show. I’ll be in China, then Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Los Angeles, Morocco, Seattle, Toronto, and then finally, in mid-December, I’ll return home to San Francisco. We’ve got a ton of things to look at this week, so without further ado, let's get to it!

• Spring Boot 2.1.0 is now available! Get the latest and greatest bits NOW!
• Spring Integrtation 5.1 goes GA!
• Spring for Apache Kafka 2.2 Released
• Spring Data Lovelace SR2 released
• Spring Cloud Function - 2.0.0.RC1 - is now available
• Spring Framework 5.1.2 available now!
• Spring Session for Apache Geode/Pivotal GemFire 2.0.6.RELEASE and 2.1.0.RELEASE Available!
• Spring Cloud Data Flow 1.7 GA Released
• Spring Cloud Finchley.SR2 Is Available
• Mark Heckler’s Spring Noticias en Español is a great resource for Spanish viewers. You can find this post on his dedicated page.
• This is very cool: Netflix uses Zipkin and Spring Cloud Sleuth for tracing!
• Check out this epic talk on InfoQ, A Guide to “Reactive” for Spring MVC Developers
• This is useful —jWebForm generates a form based on Java objects (which can include Spring Data-managed entities).
• I’ve started consuming The Java Functional and Reactive Weekly. You might dig it, too.
• This is a nice article on Reactive Programming With Project Reactor!
• Fellow Java Champion, Arun Gupta, has just shared an interesting example on how to build a custom Spring Boot-flavored JRE in Java 9 or — better yet — to reduce the size of containers. This example gets a 490 MB Docker image for a Spring Boot application cut down to 162 MB by creating custom JRE using JDK11. Check it out!
• This is a very cool write-up on how to use JUnit5 and Spring Cloud Contract.