Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring!

Today, Oracle released Java 8 and all its many wonderful features at EclipseCon. Java 8 is finally here! Be sure to grab your JDK today.

There are lots of fine features - like lambas - that enhance Spring application development. To learn more, be sure to check out Spring project lead Juergen Hoeller's webinar on the 25th of March on the subject of Spring 4 and Java 8. I'll be there!

As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it.

1. InfoQ has posted a very nice article introducing Spring Boot today by Dan Woods. Dan does a very good job, I'd recommend it.

• Spring Security lead Rob Winch has announced that the Spring Test MVC HtmlUnit framework 1.0.0.M1 has been released. The project aims to integrate HtmlUnit and Spring MVC Test.

• Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke's just announced the first service release for the Spring Data Codd release train.

• Oliver, on behalf of Michael Nitschinger, also announced the Spring Data Couchbase 1.0 GA release. Congratulations on the release, team!

• Our pal Petri Kainulainen is back with a nice post on how to write and integration-test a Spring Social and Spring MVC integration. Really deep article, and it's as always, presented as part of a running series. All worth a read, as usual.

• Speaking of EclipseCon, it was also very cool that our very own Spring Tool Suite lead Martin Lippert keynoted along with Eclipse foundation director Mike Milinkovich at packed EclipseCon 2014 today showing off Project Flux.

  

• Our pal Tomas Lin is at it again, this time with a post on how to build an application with websockets, Spring Boot, StompJS and AngularJS. The post doesn't cover actually using those technologies so much as the pain points encountered in doing a spike with those technologies. He's got links to resolutions, JIRAs, samples, etc., that helped on his journey and, because he contributed back, that benefit everyone. Spring Boot is still not GA so getting this real-world feedback is a tremendous win. Really great post, Tomás!

• I wrote a post to mark the occasion of the web's 25th birthday on the 12th of March, 2014. In the post I look at the state of the web as a platform and look at the spread of the Spring projects that support web development solutions.

• If you're in the bay area, I'll be giving a talk introducing the Spring Data Stack at the Pivotal offices on March 25th

• the Programming Free blog has a detailed post on using Spring MVC 4.0 to build a RESTful JSON web service.

• And last but not least, our pal Sergi Almar is back, this time with a very in-the-trenches look at tracking your websocket messages with Spring 4 and RabbitMQ. Very good read!