Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in sunny Sofia, Bulgaria for the Java2Days software conference. As usual, this show is way too much fun and the crowd's bigger and better than ever!

1. Spring Boot 1.2.0 RC1 is now available! This release moves embedded Servlet containers to Tomcat 8 or Jetty 9, adds a new @SpringBootApplication annotation, adds JavaMail support, and registers additional Spring Boot actuator support
2. Spring Session 1.0.0.RC1 is here with loads of features!
3. Speaking of using Spring with ZeroTurnaround, join ZeroTurnaround's Adam Koblentz and I on Nov 20th as we look at using JRebel and Spring Boot to deliver a one-two developer productivity punch without equal
4. Want to learn more about the Reactor project and the role of asych I/O in microservices? Check out the upcoming Reactor webinar!
5. Spring for Apache #Hadoop 2.1.0M2 is now available!
6. Andy Wilskinson has just announced that Spring IO Platform 1.0.3 is now available
7. Another great SpringOne2GX 2014 replay is up: Spring Data ninjas Thomas Darimont, Oliver Gierke, and Christoph Strobl's talk What's new in Spring Data.
8. Check out the replay of our pal Venkat's talk from SpringOne2GX 2014, Java 8 Language Capabilities, What's in it for you?
9. Splunk's Damien Dallimore SpringOne2GX 2014 talk, Gaining Application Lifecycle Intelligence, is now available online!
10. Slideware from SpringOne2GX 2014 is also up! They are linked to from the session details on the http://springone2gx.com website.
11. Our pal Simon Maple over at ZeroTurnaround just published a nice post, What You Can Build for Free in 2 Hours with Spring Boot, Twitter, and Facebook
12. Simon also did a nice post that has him basically following the Spring IO guide on building REST services
13. You listen to the SE Radio podcast, I trust? You should. It's legit. Check out this nice interview with James Lewis, microservice luminary, on what a microservice is. I think it's a pretty darned interesting discussion.
14. Looking for a more non-trivial Spring and WebSocket sample backed by ActiveMQ? Check out this example
15. I've been loving the Cloud Foundry After Dark recorded Google Hangout sessions. If you're not following them, this is definitely fun.
16. I do a techtip for our e-mail newsletter, and we're going to start publishing those techtips on the blog. First up: building a Spring Integration 4.1 websocket integration