Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! In a few short weeks we'll be in 2015! Will that be exciting? Of course. But this week's pretty exciting as well! So much good stuff this week.

• Spring Boot 1.2.0 is here! So many new features for Java EE (Servlet 3.1-baseline, JTA, JMS and JNDI support) and improved Jackson output, Actuator endpoints, CLI updates and performance. Spring Cloud is already tracking 1.2 and will be based on this soon, as well. Get the bits.

• Spring Boot 1.1.10 is now available with numerous fixes.

• Resident mad-scientist Andy Wilkinson just announced the latest cut of the Spring IO platform library. There are lots of things of note, but in particular it's added support for Spring Integration Flow 1.0, Spring Integration Java DSL 1.0, and Spring Integration Splunk 1.1 and updated revisions for several projects besides.

• Spring Security lead Rob Winch has announced Spring Security 4.0.0.RC1. Read his release-notes and try out the bits soon!

• Spring Data ninja Thomas Risbery has just announced Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.0.4.

• Spring Integration lead Gary Russell just announced Spring Integration and Spring AMQP maintenance releases.

• Join Gary Russell on Jan 27th as he shows new reasons why Spring Integration leads the ESB/Integration Framework market (2014 DZone research): Introducing the Java DSL for Spring Integration.

• Is in-memory your thing? Join Luke Shannon Jan 13th and learn about how Spring MVC/Spring Boot applications can leverage GemFire for persistence in his talk Building Scalable Data Applications with Spring and GemFire

• Check out the replay of Stepane Maldini's webinar introducing Reactor for asynchronous, non-blocking microservices.

• Matt Raible announced an update to his popular AppFuse starter project. One of the major changes: it now uses the Spring IO platform dependency for ease-of-version and dependency management.

• Hat Tip to Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke who sent me this useful post, A Simple Use-case Comparison of JVM Libraries for MongoDB

• Dennis wrote about Spring Boot and Logstash, Kibana and ElasticSearch.

• CodeCentric have released version 1.3.0 of their Spring Batch and Spring Boot-based starter. It now includes transaction-safe metrics.

• Speaking of Spring Boot starters, specifically, did you see Tobias' post from last month on writing your own Spring Boot starter?