Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week saw the release of the amazing Spring XD 1.0.0.RELEASE. The release announcement is a good place to start your big-data journey. There, you'll find links to other great posts, learning content, etc. This is a great opportunity to evaluate what you hope to get out of your data, and whether you're getting it. Spring XD is your big-data Swiss-army knife: it can support live, streaming workloads; batch-centric offline workloads; and general data integration solutions. If you digest but one post from this week's roundup, let it be the Spring XD release! (Then, write the data-integration solution to read and organize the rest of them using Spring XD!)

Of course, there's a lot more to say on the matter, and on all matters Spring and things, so be sure to book your place at SpringOne2GX 2014 in Dallas, TX for Sept 8-11 soon. It's simply the best opportunity to find out first hand all that's going on and to provide direct feedback. There will be deep dive sessions on Spring XD along with general Big Data talks to provide an introduction to the landscape and challenges in developing Big Data applications.

With that out of the way, let's get on to this week's roundup...

1. starting with... Spring XD 1.0.GA! I know, I know. We just did this. But, there are some great posts about Spring XD that you might take a moment to read, starting with this great introduction to Spring XD on InfoQ.

• Spring framework 4.1 RC1 dropped last week and this week we have some nice posts on Spring 4.1 features, including MVC improvements like JSONP, Google Protocol Buffers support, and Java 8 java.util.Optional support where appropriate...
• ... and a post on Spring MVC 4.1's very sensible approach to static web resource handling. Read the comments, too! There's some great feedback there, too.
• I'll be giving a webinar that looks at microservices with Spring Boot on September 16th and I hope you'll join me with questions, comments and more.
• Activiti project member Joram Barrez and I will be giving a webinar introducing how to use Spring and Activiti to deliver a one-two punch for process-centric applications - join us!
• Spring Data SR2 has just been released. This ia service release, and users are encouraged to upgrade at their earliest convenience.
• I was lucky enough to present at the Toronto Pivotal Open Source Hub meetup on Spring Boot. The recording's now available online, though I caution you the audio can be a bit choppy at times.
• Spring Cloud lead Ramnivas Laddad put up a nice post on how to use Spring Cloud programatically (as opposed to via XML, or even Spring's Java configuration). Spring Cloud is a client for PaaS-bound services like your databases, message brokers, caches, etc. It works on Heroku and Cloud Foundry. Besides working on Spring Cloud, Ramnivas is one of the original contributors to AspectJ and Spring's AOP support, and one of the early, lead architects behind Cloud Foundry. Ramnivas lives at the intersection between Spring and the cloud, and Spring Cloud is exactly what the doctor ordered!
• Spring Batch lead Michael Minella just announced that Spring Batch Admin 1.3.0 is now available. The latest release raises compatibility to the latest-and-greatest third party libraries and also represents the last cut to include the Spring Batch Integration module that now ships as part of Spring Batch 3.0.
• Did you see Michael Plöd's webinar on why he recommends Spring framework to his customers? The slidedeck's online and, I think, offers a suitably pragmatic look at the reasons for (and sometimes against) using Spring in your next project.
• The ZeroTurnaround team has put together a nice look at XRebel, an interactive profile designed to shine a light on performance issues in a running application. They disect the classic Petclinic sample application's use of sessions and see how they can optimize it. Interesting read!
• Idriss Mrabti has put together a nice post explaining how to load JSR 303 validation messages from internationalized ("i18n") MessageSources managed by Spring - handy!
• Shazin Sadakath has revisited one of his previous posts introductions to registering and using Spring-managed Filters with Spring MVC, this time doing so in Java configuration
• James Watters, director of product on the Cloud Foundry team, has put together an almost-too-abbreviated look at Cloud Foundry's features in 2 slides. I.. tried... but couldn't find anything wrong with this. If you understand those two slides, then you have enough to make the case for Cloud Foundry. Obviously, these aren't implementation instructions so much as a darned good first step at making the business case. Why Cloud Foundry for you and me? Because it's a perfect platform to run Spring-based workloads. There. That probably wouldn't even have needed a whole slide. :)