Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! I hope our American readers had a pleasant 4th of July, and I hope everybody else had a pleasant Friday!

There is, as usual, a lot to discuss this week so let's get to it!

1. Sleepless Spring Security lead Rob Winch has just announced the first milestone of Spring Session. Spring Session makes it easy to access a session from any environment (i.e. web, messaging infrastructure, etc), support for clustering in a vendor neutral way, plug in strategies for determining the session ID, and easily keep the HttpSession alive when a WebSocket is active. This is really cool! And, in fact, it might solve an issue I faced just last week where I wanted to access the HTTP session from a Web Socket handler!
2. Andy Wilkinson has just announced Spring Boot 1.1.4 release. The new release includes many bug-fixes and small new features, including support for the first stable preview release of Tomcat 8.
3. Andy also just announced the first maintenance release to Spring IO which updates versions across the platform to include Spring AMQP 1.3.5, Spring Boot 1.1.4, Spring Batch 3.0.1, Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.0.1, and Spring Framework 4.0.6. Nice job, Andy!
4. Thomas Risberg has just announced Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.0.1 which revs the dependency versions, including Hadoop 2.4.1, Spring framework 4.0.6.RELEASE, Spring Batch to 3.0.1.RELEASE, Spring Boot to 1.1.4.RELEASE.
5. Stéphane Nicoll has just announced that Spring framework 4.0.6 is now available. This release includes about 50 bugfixes.
6. Spring Social lead Craig Walls has just announced that Spring Social Facebook 2.0.0.M1 is now available. This release supports the new Facebook v2.0.0 Graph API, which introduces some breaking, obligatory, changes (thanks, Facebook!).
7. Groovy project lead Guillaume LaForge has announced the beta of the new Groovy website and is soliciting feedback from the community at large.
8. From the trenches: Join Casey Doolittle and Phil Dutson on July 15th for a webinar about a crazy project, and how they had to Build a Shopping Cart in 24 Hours using Spring.
9. Check out this upcoming webinar by Michael Plod on why he recommends Spring - learn the technology (and a bit of the business) case! Michael is a great speaker and frequently appears at conferences. Register now for the event on July 22nd.
10. On July 29th, Russ Danner from Crafter software will tell us about Conquering Content-enabled Web and Mobile Applications with Spring and Groovy.
11. Last year, Spring tool ninjas Andy Clement and Martin Lippert did a great talk at SpringOne2GX 2013 introducing the latest and greatest tooling.
12. Last year at SpringOne2GX 2013, Julien Dubois (you might recognise him from JHipster..) did a great talk looking at how to run and performance tune the classic Spring petclinic application.
13. Dr. Dobb's had a nice post looking at the new Spring IO release.
14. InfoQ's Matt Raible also put together a nice look at Spring IO. Check it out!
15. The Literate Java blog has an interesting post on implicit (component-scan-centric) vs. explicit configuration (using XML) in Spring. I'd argue that Java configuration should really be considered as it offers the best of both explicit XML configuration (centralized, easy-to-reason about configuration) and implicit, but type-safe, Java annotation-and-component-scann-centric configuration. Either way, interesting post!
16. Spring Boot is now in Thoughtwork's technology radar under assess.
17. The Codeleak.pl site has a nice look at one of the smaller, but super powerful, features in Spring 4 - CGLIB proxies no longer require a default constructor!
18. I've enjoyed this series of tutorials on using Spring and Angular.js. You might as well. Nice job, Christopher Henkel!
19. The Apprenticeship Notes blog has a nice series of tutorials on how to use Spring MVC, Thymeleaf, and Bootstrap together.
20. The Autoletics blog has a nice, numbers-filled, look at their experience profiling the Reactor project. Interesting stuff! Some of the points are interesting, too. As readers of this roundup know, Reactor is a highly concurrent event-driven IO-ready platform. And, it's ridiculously fast.
21. I wanted to give a hat tip to Paul Snively, who has been using the 1-2 punch combo of the Spring (and Scala) and a third-party integration of Spring MVC for Alfresco to build Alfresco-powered solutions. Nice!
22. Whether you like the new Groovy website or not (although, why wouldn't you?), you'll love the new Groovy 2.3.4 release which just dropped today and includes improvements on static compilation and AST transformations.
23. HornetQ project-lead Clebert Suconic is inviting community feedback about a proposed contribution of HornetQ to the Apache ActiveMQ project. We know that developers in our community know and use both, so perhaps now's a prudent time to feedback if this proposed merger affects you! I personally like the idea. ActiveMQ.next (long codenamed "Apollo") seems like it could use the hug that a HornetQ-contribution could give it. And, of course, Spring Boot supports both ActiveMQ and HornetQ now, so either way, you're set!