Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring!

A quick reminder: I'll be co-presenting a webinar introducing how to use Spring and Vaadin, the rich internet application framework, together with some folks from Vaadin. We'll present some common integration options and a few not so common ones, too! Stay tuned, and I hope to see you there!

Also, I'm starting to flesh out my speaking agenda for the next few months. So far, I know I'll be at the Great Indian Developer Summit in Bangalore, India from April 22-25, and at be at Geecon in Krakow, Poland from 14 May - 16 May. If you're in either of those regions, I'd love to see you. If you host a JUG or a UG or have a large development team and audience, I'd love to have a chance to talk with you and your group, as well. Ping me.

As usual, we've got a lot to get through, so let's get started!

1. Spring lead Juergen Hoeller has announced today a double feature release: both Spring 4.0.1 and Spring 3.2.7 have been released! Check it out.
2. Phil Webb has just announced the first release candidate for Spring Boot 1.0.0!
3. Join Apache Committer Stuart Williams and Daniel Mikusa for Introduction to Apache Tomcat 8 - Feb 8th, 2014. Reserve your seat now as this is likely to be another popular topic.
4. Webinar Feb 18th! Don't miss Oliver Gierke and Thomas Darimont as they tell us about Best Practices with Spring Data Repositories.
5. Did you miss Spring lead Juergen Hoeller's epic webinar introducing Spring 4 (which he gave twice, once for EMEA and once for NorAm timezones?) Did you also miss the two encore performances he gave a week later because the first webinar overwhelmed the web conference and left thousands of participants unable to access it? Then have no fear, you can now watch it online!
6. Along those lines, Greg Turnquist just announced that all the guides on spring.io have been upgraded to the recently released Spring Boot 1.0.0.RC1!
7. Nice! Spring MVC ninja Rossen Stoyanchev just announced an updated cut of Spring Web Flow, 2.3.3. It supports Spring 4 and JSF 2.2.
8. Over on the All and Sundry blog, Biju Kunjummen has put together a nice post introducing how to use Spring's `` - an implementation of the super type token - to correctly marshal REST API responses back and forth over the wire using generic types that would otherwise lose their generic component at runtime due to erasure. He uses the example code from the Spring REST Stack, which I developed for a talk with a lot of help from fellow Spring team members Rob Winch, Roy Clarkson, Craig Walls, Rossen Stoyanchev, Arjen Poutsma, etc.
9. Last November, I gave a talk, Have You Seen Spring Lately?. I had some trouble converting the talk from Keynote '09 to Keynote 7, and finally managed to get all that squared away. I've just uploaded the full deck (complete with extra content that some versions of this talk didn't include for want of time). I uploaded the deck on Sunday. You can find a link to the video there, as well. Enjoy!
10. Readers of this column know that I love me some good package management, and OS X's Homebrew ain't half bad. Did you know that you can install Pivotal GemFire and tcServer using Homebrew? Once you've installed the pivotal tap (brew tap pivotal/tap), simply issue brew install tcserver gemfire. Easy as that!
11. There's a deck for a talk on Spring for Apache Hadoop by Kailash Kutti.
12. Blogger Sudhir Dharmadhikari really seems to like Spring Data, and even proposes a very flattering rename for the project. To learn about why, check out his blog.
13. Spring Data ninja Thomas Darimont has just announced that Spring Data Redis 1.1.1 is now available.
14. Greg Turnquist has penned a very nice blog post explaining how you, too, can contribute to the Getting Started guides.
15. Meanwhile, over on the Pivotal blog, there's a nice post on how to use window functions in (SQL-based) data analytics. Ok, Ok, I know it has nothing to do with Spring, but it's just so darned useful. Besides, building smarter, data-centric applications will help you build smarter Spring applications!
16. Pivotal Labs Canada engineering head Farhan Thawar has a nice post on the top 5 myths of mobile application development, which line up with what we've been talking about with our mobile technologies here on the Spring team at Pivotal. Check it out, then take a look at our getting started guides to learn how Spring can help you improve your mobile offerings!
17. JHipster 0.8.0 is now out! The new release builds heavily on Spring Boot, and packs quite a whallop! Check it out!
18. Hey, have you tried out the Getting Started guides, by the way? They're dead simple! My pal and colleague Pieter Humphrey sat down and narrated his run through of some of the guides. Check it out! These two videos demonstrate useful, working code, all in about 6 minutes each!
19. BTW, I wanted to make sure people saw some of the great data- and Spring- centric posts on the GoPivotal blog from the last year. Here is one, _Adding Years to Your RDBMS by Scaling with Spring and NoSQL, another on How to Run Multiple Big Data Applications at Once with GemFire, and yet another on How to Migrate Spring applications to real time Data Grids.
20. Speaking of Gemfire, there was just recently a very nice post on how the Chinese railroad system is using GemFire to beef up its capacity in advance of the January 31st Chinese new year (or "Spring festival"). If you're reading this from China, happy new year - year of the horse - to you! You might also check out this post I put together last year on Spring at China Scale.
21. Check out this authorative guide on how Thymeleaf supports various templating styles. Templating and design can be a very important part of a site's utility, as this article - Why Simple WebSites are Scientifically Superior - explains!
22. Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke has a very nice couple of posts on Stack Overflow. The first explains how to correctly use the PagedResourceAssembler with Spring Data, and the second answers the question, are you supposed to have one repository per table in JPA?
23. There's a very good - both philosophically and technically deep - look at how to prevent unbounded queues with RabbitMQ.