Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. We've got a lot of cool stuff happening and, as you might imagine, the entire team is abuzz in preparation for SpringOne2GX 2014, coming in just a few short weeks! If you haven't registered, now's the time to do so!

1. Spring Security lead and all-around sleepless ninja Rob Winch has just announced that Spring MVC Test HtmlUnit 1.0.0.M2 has been released. This is an awesome release if you're trying to unit test real pages with Spring MVC

• Spring Boot 1.1.5 has just been released. The new release mainly addresses a few issues and is a recommended upgrade for all users.
• I really enjoyed this blog, ¿Qué es Spring Framework?, which tries to explain what the fundamental value of Spring is. Largely, the (Spanish language) article explains that Spring handles the lifecycle for objects in a consistent way. It's easy to plug in various frameworks, software, around the edges when the fundamental life-cycle is handled. I would point out that this post uses Spring 3.0 and XML configuration, which is a bit outdated, though certainly still works.
• The RebelLabs folks are back at it with an interesting look at web framework usage. Check out this latest report which has Spring MVC leading the charge (by a lot).
• This is a nice post looking at how to use Spring MVC (as part of Spring framework 4.x) to handle file uploads
• The *Mr. Haki * blog has a nice post on analyzing dependencies using Gradle, with an example based on Spring Boot. Spring Boot, of course, is easy to get started with, can be used with Maven or Gradle, and has numerous benefits, not the least of which being that it makes it dead simple to use Spring libraries in your project without worrying about version mismatches.
• Stuck on JAX-RS and JSF? Still want to use Spring Security? This post - from the JSF Usefullness post - has the code snippets that (sort of) demonstrate a path forward. Granted, you'll have an easier time of doing this using straight Spring. No need to add all that extra Java EE weight..
• This is a sort of oldie-but-a-goodie: a post on how to implement a JQuery-powered autosave example in Spring MVC
• This is a (particularly tortured) example of how to write a Spring application that uses Primefaces and runs on the Wildfly application server. I don't see why you'd need all this indirection when Spring has good JSF support out of the box. Additionally, there's no reason to recreate the JdbcTemplate or inject an ApplicationContext into a bean. Maybe it'll help somebody as a first-cut, though.

So, did I mention SpringOne2GX 2014? It's right around the corner! I'll be there, and so will everyone from the Spring team, so don't miss out. This is going to be an amazing year. I happen to know what some of the keynotes are going to be about. Do not miss out. Register today!