Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's a few weeks before SpringOne2GX 2014, already! Time sure flies when you're having fun! The beginning of 2015 will mark the 4th year of This Week in Spring, and it's more exciting every week! I'm hoping to see as many of you as possible at SpringOne2GX 2014. This is sure to be an amazing event.

Anyway, with that out of the way, let's get on to this week's roundup!

1. Spring Security lead Rob Winch just announced Spring Security 4.0.0.M2, which

provides a lot of great features, including improved Security-aware testing support, Spring Data integration, support for websocket security, and ties into the nascent Spring Session projet that was derived from the work for this release. Check it out! Rob also announced Spring Security 3.2.5 and 3.1.7 which is a fix that closes a few potential security holes. This is good stuff, all around!

• Spring framework 4.1.RC2 just dropped. Spring 4.1 is very near completion, so be sure to check out the latest and greatest bits in this release!
• Christoph Strobl just announced the first RC for the Spring Data Evans release train. The new release includes a lot of features, including text search integration for Spring Data MongoDB, improved multistore support, configuration options for Redis sentinels, and much more.
• Our friends at Codecentric have just announced a new cut of their custom Spring Boot autoconfiguration for Spring Batch. This implementation is different than the auto-configuration provided out of the box with Spring Boot, and includes support for JSR 352.
• Netflix Developer Dan Woods recently gave a nice talk looking at what they hope to get out of the Spring Boot-based Grails 3, and the slide deck is definitely worth a look.
• The Being Java Guys blog has a nice post on how to build a REST service with Spring 4 and Hibernate 4. The example uses web.xml and Spring XML configuration. It's a working recipe, but I hope readers will remember that you can get the same done with Spring Boot in much less time and code.
• Oracle has particular support for Spring-based applications in WebLogic 12.1.3 which, I confess, I didn't know about. This is a pretty interesting read if you're on WebLogic.
• Tirthal's Java cafe blog takes a look at the recently announced Spring IO.
• This Vietnamese-language post on building a simple Spring-based web application was pretty straightforward, and worth a read.
• This post introduces how to integrate Spring Security 3.0.4 and GWT