Welcome back to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Krakow, Poland for Geecon, the Polish developer conference where, of course, I'll be speaking to developers about Spring. (and, maybe, Spring). If you're around, find me, I'll be wearing the giant Spring leaf t-shirt! :)

Other than that, there's a lot to get through so let's get to it!

• In preparation for the upcoming Spring IO Platform, Spring Data release train Dijkstra has been released! This is a tremendous release train that includes: JPA, MongoDB, Neo4J, Apache Solr, Couchbase, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Gemfire, Redis and Data REST! Congrats to the Spring Data Team!
• Spring Boot 1.1.0 M1 is now available and introduces MongoDB and Gemfire support, as well as improved actuator metrics and health endpoints.
• Final maintenance releases for the Spring Framework 3.2.x and 4.0.x versions are now available!
• Spring Integration ninja (rockstar!) Artem Bilan put together a nice post introducing all the amazing Java configuration support in the nascent Spring Integration Java configuration DSL, which builds upon the basic @EnableIntegration support available in the just-released Spring Integration 4.0. You should read that post. Seriously. I want to steal some of Artem's thunder by excerpting this one amazing code-snippet:

  java @Bean IntegrationFlow helloWorldFlow() { return IntegrationFlows.from("helloWorldInput") .filter("World"::equals) .transform("Hello "::concat) .handle(System.out::println) .get(); } Yep! That's a Spring Integration flow that handles input messages, filters them, transforms them, and then gives them to the escape-hatch method, handle, which lets the developer insert any behavior into the mix. Remember, you can change anything about this - including where it gets the messages from and where it writes the messages to. Indeed, the output of one flow could be the input to another. Congratulations, Spring Integration team! Also, make sure to check out the launch webinar replay!

• I know I mentioned this last week, but it's so worth a re-read! Groovy 2.3.0 is here! (Hah! Gotcha! This week's link was to a different post by the same author on the subject of the Groovy 2.3.0 release! But aren't you glad you read it, anyway?) Go, Groovy, go!
• My pal Pieter Humphrey has done a nice introductory screencast on Spring XD - showing how to get up and running doing stream processing, and wiring it to an analytics dashboard in less than 7 minutes. XD uses a deceptively simple DSL (domain specific language) and no Java code - it's never been easier to work with Hadoop.
• Spring Security lead Rob Winch has been moving heaven and earth to make unit-testing secure applications easier than ever. In this first installment of a new series, Rob looks at new annotations designed to stand in place of a live-fire Spring Security apparatus to mock a Principal, a UserDetailsService, and more. Check it out and stay tuned for more!
• Speaking of Rob Winch, he gave an epic introduction to Spring Security at SpringOne2GX 2013 last year. This is a perfect place to jump onboard if you're new to Spring Security.
• New Relic's Ashley Puls was kind enough to do a webinar with your humble author on Web Application Diagnostics using New Relic. Thanks, Ashley! I'll be very honest, this webinar was super informative for me. I knew just a little about New Relic, and in working through the development of the webinar I learned about a zillion and five use cases that are well served by New Relic. Really cool stuff!
• Also published this week - a SpringOne2GX 2013 Replay by Emad Benjamin and Guillermo Tantucho: Virtualizing and Tuning Large Scale Java Platforms. This goes over JVM memory tuning and all the tricks and tips for getting Java to run well on a virtualized environment.
• SpringOne2GX 2013 replay - a great talk from SAS Software: Migrating from WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss to Pivotal tcServer. This might go well with a recent post on why App Servers are dead by Eberhard Wolff.
• Do you love Spring's new home on the web, spring.io, as much as I do? Want to learn more? Check out this talk by project lead and Spring ninja Chris Beams on the makeup of the site, its development, and deployment.
• Last week, Spring Data Neo4j lead and graph-ninja Michael Hunger and I gave a talk on Spring Boot and Neo4j. This talk was fun for me because it gave me a lot of excuses to play with Neo4j. In point of fact, Michael and I are doing a webinar on about the same subject on the 20th of May (that's 7 days away!), so come see what we've come up with. In the meantime, you may want to check out this recent post on creating a time-tree with Cypher, the language that Michael works on that's used to drive interactions with Neo4j. That post was, of course, a response to another post that Michael put together on importing forests into Neo4j, also worth a read!
• I quite liked this post introducing how to setup a Spring Batch job using Spring Boot. The author found a comfortable configuration-middle ground in the Groovy BeanBuilder support, and describes it nicely in this post
• Moritz Schulze has put together a very nice post, following others in the series, on how to integration test REST services
• Are you using Spring Boot and want to use Spock? Netflix engineer Tomas Lin has put together an example on his GitHug page. Check it out!
• Jakub Kubrynski has put together a nice post on how to use Spring Boot's org.springframework.boot.actuate.system.ApplicationPidListener (which Jakub contributed - thanks Jakub!) - to work with the application's process identifier (PID). Nice!
• Meltdown 1.0.0 has been released! Meltdown is a Clojure interface to the Reactor project. So... functional programming and stream processing inside a lisp-like language? A dream! Check it out!