Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring! There is, of course, lots to talk about so let's get to it.

If you're in the bay area, I'd like to invite you to the Silicon Valley Code Camp this weekend. I'll be giving two talks - one on building RESTful Services with Spring and the other on Improving Spring Java configuration muscle-memory with the amazing Phill Webb. Pivotal will also have a booth there, and we'd love to see you!

1. Spring Data Arora SR3 has been released! The new release folds in Spring Data Commons 1.5.3, Spring Data JPA 1.3.5, Spring Data MongoDB 1.2.4 and Spring Data Neo4j 2.2.3. Nicely done, as usual, Oliver!

• Check out our upcoming webinar on building big data applications with Hadoop and Spring on October 3.
• Be sure to register for a webinar introducing how to build websocket applications with Spring the week after, on October 8. In it, Rossen Stoyanchev will introduce Spring 4's websocket support.
• Last week at JavaOne 2013 we made quite a splash with our new website! I am going to attempt to introduce some of the amazing reference content every week in this very space. You, of course, don't need to wait every week to start reading all the cool content! Just start here, at the site Guides page. This week, I hope you'll take a look at how to get started developing RESTful services with Spring. It introduces, in the space of ~ 15 minutes, how to get started with Spring REST development.
• Spring XD ninja Glenn Renfro put together a nice post on how to add custom modules to Spring XD.
• The next version of RabbitMQ will have consumer priorities! From the article, "Consumer priorities allow you to ensure that high priority consumers receive messages while they are active, with messages only going to lower priority consumers when the high priority consumers block." Very cool stuff!
• Petri Kainulainen has put together a very nice example of how to use Spring Social's sign-in capabilities in a Spring MVC web application.
• Our pal Xavier Padró's is back! This time, he's got a nice post on using Spring Web Services to create contract-first webservices with Spring WS.
• Our friend Jan Machacek is back! This time with a post on websockets, Angular.js, RabbitMQ and C++ in Spring 4. I.. uh… it has computer vision, too. Did I mention that… I mean… I got nothing. This is way too cool. Go check it out!
• Matt Stine has reworked the code demonstrated in Adrian Colyer's SpringOne 2012 keynote to build an auto-scaler for Cloud Foundry!
• Ben Hale, a longtime Spring ninja and the man behind the reworked Cloud Foundry Java buildpack that drew so much attention at the Platform CF event, has just written a simple utility that automatically merges upstream repositories. Alright, I grant you, the utility isn't for everyone. BUT, check out the code! It's written using Groovy and Spring Boot. The code is itself 40% the size of it's (Apache 2) license!
• I just wanted to congratulate the Pivotal Data Science team for a strong showing at the 24 Hour Data Science Code-a-Thon hosted by Kaiser Permanente! Check out that post for their entry, approach, and competition results!