Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's already July, and Summer is here! Can you believe it? Time sure flies. We've got a lot to cover this week, as usual, so let's get to it.

1. Last week, we announced the Spring IO platform. I won the lottery on this one, and they let me write the blog, but this effort reflects more than a year of internal discussion, planning, hard work, cooperation and coordination between all the Spring projects. I did my level-headed best to introduce the Spring IO platform in this blog. You should read it. If it doesn't sound awesome and very, very useful, than I've simply done a poor job explaining it! :D Don't hesitate to reach out. The Spring IO platform is a radically simpler way of dealing with dependencies across all the Spring portfolio projects. It's also a simpler logical model when using the Spring projects.

• Dr. Dave Syer just announced that Spring Boot 1.1.3 is now available. This is mainly a bugfix release affecting Windows users.
• Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke has announced Spring Data Dijkstra SR1. This includes 59 bugfixes across numerous modules.
• Want to use Spring Boot? So do a lot of people. And there are many ways to get started. I tried to document some of the common options - the Spring Initializr, STS, and others like JHipster - in this little blog
• There's a nice post on Zoltan's blog about Spring's flexible cache abstraction. The blog demonstrates how you might readily use a local cache like EHCache or a distributed cache like Hazelcast. Cool stuff! Also be sure to check out the great work coming in Spring 4.1's updates to the cache abstraction.
• As readers of this space will know, we (along with RedHat, Typesafe, Netflix, etc), are cooperating on the reactive streams project, which aims to provide a foundational layer for reactive applications. Our implementation is based on our Reactor project, which underpins Spring 4's very robust websocket support), for example. The Scalac.io blog has a nice example on how to use Typesafe's implementation of the collaboration along with RabbitMQ. The Reactor implementation shouldn't be too far along, and in the meantime, this is a nice look at one approach to working with RabbitMQ.
• Speaking of RabbitMQ, the Google Cloud Platform blog has a great post on how to setup a RabbitMQ cluster to handle over a million messages a second in a single click with Google's GCE (Google Compute Engine). That's super cool! It's nice to see RabbitMQ added to the staple of supported middleware on GCE. (I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Cloud Foundry and basically every other Platform-as-a-Service have simialarly painless setup for RabbitMQ, as well...)
• Helmet M. Juskewycz from Lingohub has just published a very cool blog on why Lingohub is moving from Ruby on Rails to Spring MVC. I should mention that even within Pivotal - a company with developers of all walks of life - we've seen some migration to Spring (and Spring Boot), as well!
• The Spring Security and Spring Data teams are cooking up some great stuff for us. Check out some of the work!
• I just found this post on how to add Spring framework to an Eclipse project. The steps provided aren't specific to Spring, though. I'd recommend you just use the Spring Tool Suite and go to File -> New -> Spring Starter Project. For more on how simple STS makes working with Spring, check out this introduction video.