This Week in Spring: SpringOne Platform 2018 Edition

It’s been such a crazy time at the SpringOne Platform 2018, and we literally just started! I don’t even know where to begin! The show represents the convergence of the best and brightest in the world of Spring. It’s absolutely amazing all the people who want and love to be here.

From our friends in the ecosystem, we see people from all organizations — IBM, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google are all here hoping to make their platform the most compelling place to run Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Spring-based workloads. It’s great to see my friends from all these organizations! Friends like Erin Schnabel, Billy Korando, and Pratik Patel from IBM...

…and my friend Ray Tsang from Google and Bruno Borges from Microsoft!

It’s nice when you can reunite with old colleagues who are now ecosystem partners and friends — it was amazing to see the former VMWare and Pivotal alum Mark Chmarny (left) representing Google’s KNative efforts today!

It was also great to see former SpringSource colleagues and friends, Rod Johnson (creator of Spring) and Christian Dupuis, representing Atomist, the new continuous delivery sensation that’s sweeping the nation!

I had fun MC’ing this morning’s keynote with Pivotal legend Dormain Drewitz!

It was crazy fun sharing the stage with some of the best in the business, including the Spring team’s own legends, Spring co-founder Juergen Hoeller and the good Dr. David Syer.

Life Tip: find yourself some friends who like you enough to take a selfie with you while 3000+ ppl are in the room watching and waiting, while there are countless thousands more watching on the live stream! #springOne

I love my @springcentral fam: LTR dr. @david_syer and @springjuergen

Speaking of the good Dr. Syer, I love this pearl of wisdom (among the thousands) from his keynote this morning:

I am so grateful that my buddy Matt Raible and I managed to finish a crazy 75+ printed pages of blog content just in time for the big show! Cheers, buddy! We did it!

At SpringOne Platform, anything is possible! The Spring team is geographically dispersed, so it’s great to be able to catch selfies with a plurality of any given team all in the same venue! Here, I get selfies with three members of the Spring Security team:

It wouldn’t be a world-class event if, in addition to seeing old friends, we couldn’t make new ones.

Neha Narkhede, co-founder and CTO at Confluentinc and co-creator of Apache Kafka, absolutely killed it this morning in her keynote address at the conference. What a legend! What an amazing speaker and an amazing technologist!

It means everything to us to see our customers thriving. It was amazing to see DICKS Sporting Goods take the stage today to share their digital journey:

I had the privilege of introducing DICKS Sporting Goods so I thought I’d dress the part. I even went to a store in South San Francisco this weekend and got my attire just for their big debut!

A huge part of the value of SpringOne Platform, for those of us at Pivotal as well as the larger ecosystem, is just getting the chance to see the legends in our ecosystem that changed the world. I’m a big James Watters fan. He’s a big reason why, as a company, we all get out and work as hard as we can for our customers. He’s shown us, always leading by example time and time again, that if we focus on the customer and their desired outcomes, good things can happen. Rock on James! #GOAT

For every photo or moment that I’ve shared here, there are a thousand other ones I haven’t shared. It’s been an INSANE 24 hours since the show started in full swing, and we’ve got miles to go before we sleep!

So, without further ado, let’s get to this week’s amazing, release-packed roundup!

• Spring Cloud Function 2.0 and Azure Functions
• Good news, everybody! Spring Tool Suite 4 is here! I want to personally congratulation our Spring Tool Suite lead, Martin Lippert, on this incredible journey! STS 4 is a complete reworking of the engine behind the plugins supporting our Eclipse distribution. That engine represents a radical reprioritization of goals: the tools give you validation now based on runtime behavior instead of false positive yielded by trying to second-guess Spring at design time. These tools result in Java that is fast and productive during development, with no red squigglies! And, any validation and navigation information is informed by the actual runtime behavior of the application. It’s just more accurate. Additionally, the engine itself has been extracted out into language servers, which run independent of Eclipse and are supported in Microsoft Visual Studio Code and Atom. I’m super impressed with this release! This has been a long journey and was well worth the wait.
• Spring Boot team legend, Madhura Bhave, has just announced Spring Boot 2.1.M4! The new Spring Boot 2.1.0.M4 release ships with a ton of things, including preliminary support for Spring Data JDBC, including a @DataJdbcTest annotation. Check it out!
• Hands on with Spring Vault 2.1 is here!
• Spring Integration, AMQP, and Kafka Release Candidates are now available.
• Spring Session BOM Bean-RC1 has been released.
• Spring Data JDBC, References, and Aggregates are now available.
• Spring Boot for Apache Geode and Pivotal GemFire 1.0.0.M3 were recently released!
• Spring Data Lovelace GA released also!
• Spring Framework 5.1 goes GA!
• Meet the New AWS Service Broker for PCF, now an Open Beta. Here’s why it’s the easiest way to add 18 AWS Services to your Cloud Native apps.
• Spring Tool Suite 3.9.6 released!
• Spring Web Services 3.0.4 / 2.4.3 released!
• Announcing Spring Cloud Function - 2.0.0.M2
• Spring creator, Rod Johnson, has got a nice post on how Atomist helps liberate modern Spring developers from the scourge of too much .YAML
• IBM has some very interesting posts on building Spring applications that are destined for IBM Cloud and using Spring with IBM Cloud and IBM software.
• I love the new Spring Tool Suite release so much I put together a quick primer that shows how to develop Java-based Spring Boot-based applications that get deployed to production in the cloud on Cloud Foundry, all from within the fantastically streamlined and productive Spring Tool Suite 4. Check it out!
• I love that buildpacks have finally been extracted out into a separate thing that’s now standard across platforms. Read on to learn more!
• Vlad Mihalcea has a nice post on the Spring read-only transaction optimization
  in Hibernate. Check it out!
• Just in time for SpringOne Platform, check out riff v0.1.3. Riff is the function-as-a-service sensation that’s sweeping the nation!
• My buddy Matt Raible and I have been burning the midnight oil to get this massive blog series complete — three parts spanning 70+ printed pages in all — out in time for the epic SpringOne Platform event. It is so worth a read.
• Java 11 is here! The best part about ii is how mundane it all is. If you’re using the excellent SDKMAN, then all you need to do is say: sdk install java 11.ea.28-open and then head on over to the Spring Initializr and build a new project using Java 11. InfoQ has a nice post with some details here.
• I love this post by Mario’s own Mario Gray on testing reactive cloud Spring-based applications.
• The SpringUni blog has a nice post on using Spring Cloud GCP with Google Cloud that expands upon a post in my recent 8-part miniseries. It’s worth a read!
• Reactor Californium-RELEASE has shipped this week!
• RabbitMQ 3.7.8 is out!
• As if this week weren’t epic enough, there’s a new release of the Redis Lettuce driver. Be sure to check it out.
• In light of the new Java 11 release, it feels appropriate to look at the long and fascinating history of Java thus far.
• This is a nice article that looks at using MongoDB’s tailable queries to support continuous queries, a feature you might be familiar with if you’ve ever used a distributed data grid, like Coherence or Apache Geode
• You know that you can stream the mainstage action at SpringOne Platform 2018, don’t ya? Cuz... you can!
• You surely know by now that you can fork the Spring Initializr — here’s an example of what one group has done with their fork.