Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. This week's an exciting week! Well, let's be honest. They're all exciting weeks. But in particular, this week's going to make a lot of people happy. Watch the blog and I'll see you back here next week to recap! :)

1. Oh my goodness! Spring Boot 1.1.0.RC1 is now available! The new release maintains the epic with support for Spring Data Elasticsearch, HornetQ, and Spring Social, and a lot more! Grab the latest release, kick the tires, and feedback on Twitter or GitHub.
2. Dr. Mark Pollack has just announced that the latest release of Spring XD, 1.0.0.M7 is now available. The new release provides a lot of great new features. My favorite is the ability to pin data to a certain stream - think of this as correllation using a message's content - so that you can preserve stateful operations. Think of this as a great way to route and divide messages based on a useful business key. There's a great example in the release notes.
3. Azul rockstar Gil Tene gave an amazing talk on reducing latency for SpringOne2gX 2013 that is now available online. Gil is one of our industry's mad scientists. I haven't yet seen this talk, but I will, and I highly recommend that you do too. Azul makes high performance, low latency JVMs both as appliances and as deliverable software. His talks thus stem from a lot of thankless research and development that I'd just as soon spare myself by watching, and learning from, his talks. Go, Gil!
4. June webinars are here! Michael Minella in Spring Batch 3.0.0 on June 10th, and Glenn Renfro in Spring Integration Done Boot-ifully on June 17th.
5. Spring ninja Greg Turnquist has put together a teaser post on using the amazing when.js Promises/A+ implementation in a front-end REST client in advance of his SpringOne2GX 2014 talk. Check out the post and his talk at the conference!
6. Ramnivas Laddad, a Spring ninja, original AspectJ leaders, and architects behind Cloud Foundry, has just posted a very cool look at Spring Cloud, which makes consuming client services from different middle/infrastructure services (a database, a message queue) on various Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaSes) a simple matter of platform-decoupling configuration.
7. The replay of ADP's Jeffery Sologov's talk looking at the pitfalls of building large scale applications is now up! Check it out!
8. ttp://twitter.com/JakubJirutka chimed in to tell us about this epic Spring Expression Language (SpEL)-powered implementation of the Bean Validation API (JSR 303/349). The GitHub offers an interesting point, "it’s especially very useful for cross-field validations that are very complicated with a plain Bean Validation." I love the examples, too:

    
   @SpELAssert(value = "password.equals(passwordVerify)",
           applyIf = "password || passwordVerify",
           message = "{validator.passwords_not_same}")
   public class User {
     private String password;
     private String passwordVerify;
   }
   

   Nice job!

9. A hat tip to the amazing Brian Dussault for finding this: Zuul is a nifty looking application configuration management solution that offers a clean Spring client API.

10. You know what made my day yesterday? A HystrixInvocationHandler. An InvocationHandler is used by the JDK (and Spring's rich proxying subsystem) to create proxies that wrap beans. This InvocationHandler wraps method invocations on a given bean in Netflix's OSS Hystrix project's Command objects. Hystrix Commands wrap functionality and provide/support resiliency patterns. I can't wait to see more of what becomes of Spencer Gibb's Halfpipe project!
11. Our pal David Welch is at it again, this time with an interesting project called Spring Tiered, which aims to simplify even further (and normalize) the development of HATEOAS based services. Interesting...
12. Also, speaking of building (and consuming) resilient services, check out Chris Richardson's fantastic talk from SpringOne2GX 2013 on powerful abstractions for consuming services asynchronously.
13. Also, I put together a post talking about getting started with Maven (and alternatives) and Spring