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This Month in Spring – January 2023

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Month in Spring! I hope your holidays were excellent! It's a new year and a chance for new and novel. As I write this, we're also smack dab in the middle of the Lunar New Year, the year of the rabbit. So, to those billions of people worldwide who celebrate: Happy Lunar New Year!

As I write this, I'm in New York City, New York. I came to host a SpringOne Essentials watch party for folks who registered for that here in New York City. I joined a good crowd here at the VMware New York City office, presented some of my favorite features in the Spring ecosystem, and then joined thousands and thousands worldwide to watch the SpringOne Essentials Livestream.

If you weren't there… you missed out! It was awesome, but have no fear: I took notes! There was a lot of really cool stuff, and I couldn't hope to cover it all; after all, even the abbreviated Essentials took nine hours to introduce! I wouldn't even know where to start, but here are some of my favorite moments.

  • VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram introduced the scope of SpringOne Essentials and connected the fantastic opportunities awaiting application developers using Spring to the large VMWare mission.
  • Then VMWare SVP James Watters took the stage to talk about the idea of building "cloud smart" software and systems, which are systems and software designed and able to run on multiple clouds, a requirement in the modern era of utility cloud computing infrastructure.
  • Spring co-founder and legend Jürgen Hoeller took the stage both in the opening day mainstage talks and in a subsequent detailed session to talk about the exciting new opportunities implied by Spring Framework 6.0 and Spring Boot 3.0. He looked at the support lifetimes for Spring, release dates, support lifetimes, and how they coincide with Java release dates. Then he got right into the new baselines for Spring Framework 6.0, which requires Java 17+ and Jakarta EE 9+. He also spoke to some exciting implications for the latest release, looking forward and contextualizing what is here today with how it'll apply to what will come tomorrow. Finally, he spoke about the new AOT engine in Spring Framework 6.0, which makes it trivial to generate GraalVM native image-ready applications that startup instantly and take vanishingly small amounts of RAM. While the AOT engine is here today, in Spring Framework 6.0, it'll play nicely with Project Leyden, an effort to offer a spectrum of opt-in optimizations for a JVM application, conceivably including AOT-like native images. Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint (CRaC) is an OpenJDK feature that provides a fast start and immediate performance for Java applications. It's not yet GA, but some exciting opportunities exist for Spring developers.
  • Your services and systems are only as safe as their security stack, so it's no wonder that organizations far and wide choose Spring Security to help protect their systems and services, connecting to all sorts of identity providers (IDPs) to authentication and authorization a breeze. You can also use Spring Security as your IDP with the new Spring Authorization Server, which Joe Grandja, Steve Riesenberg, and Laurentiu Spilca introduced in a fantastic day three session.
  • Decades of building distributed systems have shown time and time again that messaging-oriented middleware (MOM), message queues, and message buses (or whatever you want to call them) are the backbone for reliable and resilient systems and services. And there is no more straightforward abstraction than Spring Cloud Stream, which Glenn Renfro and Oleg Zhurakousky introduced on Day three.
  • Thomas Wuerthinger (the GraalVM project founder) and Sebastien Deleuze took the stage to dive deep into what GraalVM is, precisely what the native-image compiler offers Spring developers with the new AOT engine in Spring Framework 6.0. This segment was one of my favorites; Sebastien kickstarted the AOT work in Spring many years ago, and Thomas cofounded GraalVM. You don't often hear from two people more steeped in a particular technology and discipline than these two!
  • Are you running Kubernetes and want to get out from under a mountain of YAML and distractions? Then you should use the Tanzu Application Platform (TAP), which lets organizations right-size their deployment pipelines and build their golden path to production. It was really exciting seeing Ryan Baxter, Cora Iberkleid, Greg Meyer, Nivedita Ghosh, Ben Hale, Adib Saikali, and Scott Sisil all chime in at various points to expand on the possibilities.
  • Microsoft's Sandra Ahlgrimm joined Sebastien to bring us up to date on the latest and greatest in Azure Spring Apps, the cloud platform jointly developed platform by the Spring team and Microsoft. Then, VMware VP Ryan Morgan and Microsoft CVP Amanda Silver took the stage to look at Azure Spring Apps Enterprise, which bundles even more amazing features for Spring developers wanting to develop and deploy cloud-native services on Azure Spring Apps. There was a great session by VMware's Adib Saikali and Microsoft's Asir Selvasingh that also went into detail about Azure Spring Apps on the second day.
  • While Spring has already delivered so much, a huge part of this keynote was the possibilities that lay beyond the horizon. Spring keeps growing, and so should you. We've tried on the Spring team to support this continuing education process (have you seen my Spring Tips Youtube series?), but today we're announcing the best way forward yet: the Spring Academy. The Spring Academy is a free platform offering on-demand education curated by the world's foremost experts in Spring. This platform is everything you need for Spring Certification. Are you ready to take your Spring skills to the next level? Get access to the official Spring Certified Professional exam and the prerequisite courses you’ll need to get prepped—all included in your (cheap, but not free) Spring Academy Pro membership.

Stay tuned for the live streams themelves! In the meantime, we've got a ton of fun things to get into this month, so let's get goin'!

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