Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. There's a lot of good stuff this week, including content on Apache Tomcat, Spring Security's new Java configuration updates, Spring Batch's Java configuration support, and so much more! We're fast approaching the August price increase for SpringOne2GX 2013 so register now and lock in the lower rate. Ok -- Let's get to it!

1. Craig Walls has announced that Spring Social 1.1.0.M3 (including revs to Spring Social, Spring Social Facebook, and Spring Social Twitter) is now available. The new release has a lot of compelling features including a new ReconnectFilter, support for OAuth 2's 'state' parameter to prevent CSRF attacks, and initial support for Twitter's streaming API.
2. Spring Security lead Rob Winch never sleeps. Also, he's just put together several very interesting posts on the brand new Spring Security Java configuration support. He starts the series with an introductory post. The second post covers the details of method-level security (fine-grained access control at the level of individual method invocations). The third post covers the details of web-based security (intercepting HTTP requests). The last post looks at how to use Java configuration to configure Spring Security OAuth. These posts are definitely worth a read! If you love these posts as much as I do, would you please upvote them on DZone?
3. Have you guys been following Spring XD's development? It's really coming along nicely! One thing that caught my eye recently? The amazing Andy Clement, designer and implementer of the amazing Spring Expression Language (SpEL), and a major contributor to the amazing tooling in the Spring Tool Suite and Grails Tool Suite, is now putting his amazing talents to work building a DSL for Spring XD jobs. To learn more, and to feedback on use cases that might be valuable to you, check out the JIRA.
4. Upcoming Webinar: Join Mattias Severson & Johan Haleby on July 18th for a talk on Functional Programming without Lambdas.
5. Upcoming Webinar: Join Hemant Joshi on July 30th for a talk on Spring with Cucumber for Automation.
6. The replay of last week's webinar, Resistance Is Not Futile: How To Talk Spring And Influence People, is now available on the SpringSourceDev YouTube channel! This webinar provides soft-skills required to help introduce the Spring framework in your organization.
7. Petri Kainulainen is back at it, this time with a post on to unit test regular Spring MVC @Controllers.
8. News for Groovy & Grails, SpringSource changed the 3-day class to a new 4-day developer class. The first opportunity to attend will be Groovy & Grails in San Francisco.
9. Tobias Flohre is back at it again! The last two parts of his awesome series Spring Batch Java Configuration are available. The first post has to do with modular configuration with Java configuration. The second post has to do with job partitioning and multi-threaded steps
10. Apache Tomcat ninja Mark Thomas has announced the release of Apache Tomcat 7.0.42, which contains a number of bug fixes and improvements compared to version 7.0.41.
11. Stuart Williams (or @pidster, to those who know him) has recently put together a nice Spring Shell-powered console for working with MQTT messaging systems. Spring Integration also features nice support for MQTT in the Spring Integration Extensions repository.
12. Speaking of Apache Tomcat, did you guys see Mark Thomas' presentation introducing some of the upcoming Apache Tomcat 8 from last year?