Welcome back to another installation of This Week in Spring! What a week! We're fast approaching the final stretch of the journey to SpringOne2GX 2013 and preparations are underway at full tilt. This year's going to be memorable. I wish I could tell you more, but trust me when I say you need to be at this show this year! :)

Anyway, let's get on with the roundup!

1. Mark Pollack has announced the release of Spring XD 1.0 milestone 1. Spring XD is a unified, distributed, and extensible system for data ingestion, real time analytics, batch processing, and data export. The project’s goal is to simplify the development of big data applications.
2. Join Tony Erksine from Liberty University on June 27th as he instructs us How to talk Spring and Influence People, a pragmatic lesson on soft skills and technology adoption strategies needed to help get other people in your company excited about and using, new technology -- in this case, with Spring.
3. Want a pass to SpringOne 2GX 2013? If you're a Spring champion, show off your stuff on our champions forum and follow these instructions by June 21, 2013. You might be one of our 5 lucky winners! (If you're a Groovy & Grails or Cloud Foundry champion, never fear, we will be rolling out future contests for you!)
4. Head over to gopivotal.com for the next blog in the Hadoop 101 series -- How to Use Spring Batch with Spring for Apache Hadoop.
5. We're excited to launch A Week of Spring in conjunction with Manning Publications. Check out this post for more information on great discounts for titles covering SpringSource technologies! Every day we're posting a new 50% discount code for two books.
6. Our pal Tobias Fiohre is back at it again, this time with not one, not two, but three posts on Java configuration support for Spring Batch, just released in the latest Spring Batch 2.2.0.RELEASE of Spring Batch. The first post looks at how Spring Batch's Java configuration support compares with the XML equivalents. The second post looks at the Spring Batch StepScope, which lets you configure jobs with parameters provided at runtime (as opposed to design-time. The third post looks at how to use the new configuration style with Spring's environment profiles feature.
   
7. Johnathan Mark Smith has put together a post on how use Spring MVC and Spring MVC Test
   
8. Xavier Padró's has put together a nice post that introduces Spring's core Aspect-Oriented Programming support.
   
9. The video replay of the webinar from the Broadleaf Commerce project on their migration from GWT to Spring MVC is now online at our SpringSourceDev YouTube channel.
10. This isn't strictly Spring-related, but I felt it worth mentioning: Java 9 is slated to drop support for compiling Java 1.4-or-older source code. Java 8 is approaching (finally!), and Spring 4 will offer first class support for Java 8 lambas. Java 6 is EOL as of February 2013, so if you're not already on Java 7, consider just making the jump to Java 8 when it drops early next year. If you're migrating right now, definitely consider looking at Java 7 at a minimum. Spring, of course, works well with older JDK versions, but we often provide functionality specific to newer language releases if they're available. For example, we debuted annotations (like @Transactional) when Java 5 made it feasible, as an addition to our then primary support for commons annotations, even while we supported Java 1.3 and 1.4. Java 8 is no different.
11. I did a webinar last week on building REST APIs with Spring. The webinar video will be up soon on our SpringSource Developer YouTube channel. For the many who've asked, the code is available on my GitHub account, and the slides are available on my SlideShare account. Check them out!
    
12. Petri Kainulainen has put together a really detailed, easily-read post on how to plugin a property from a property file when configuring the @Scheduled annotation's CRON expression