Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week, as is our tradition, we'll look back at a few of the big things that made 2014 a wonderful year to be a Spring developer. And, what a year it was!

• The tail end of last year saw Spring 4 GA and this year saw the Spring 4.1 release just shy of 9 short months after 4.0! Spring 4.x boasts a dizzying array of new features! Java 8 support, Java EE 7 support, new Spring MVC views, JSR 107 support, a powerful resource pipeline and the @Conditional annotation which of course made possible...
• Spring Boot, whose first 1.0 GA was in April of this year, has seen two epic updates (1.1, and 1.2) since then. Spring Boot's taken the community by storm, spawning all sorts of activity both from our team and, more importantly, from everybody else! The competition have attempted to downplay it, or copy it. Existing Spring users have flocked to it in droves (including the likes of Netflix and Ticketmaster). If you follow this weekly roundup, though, then you need no further evidence of the community's uptake! It's been so much fun watching people blog about using Spring Boot to do... seemingly everything!
• Spring XD 1.0 was released earlier this year and a followup, Spring XD 1.1 is fast nearing completion. Spring XD (also built on Spring Boot, BTW!), provides a workbench for data processing by building on Spring Integration, Spring Data and Spring Batch. It's slick, fast, elegant, and of course people have been quick to include it in their arsenal.
• Spring Cloud was announced this year at SpringOne2GX 2014 in Dallas, TX. Spring Cloud provides support for building cloud-native, microservice-style applications and builds on the programming model exposed by Spring Boot. It integrates popular libraries and infrastructure like many of the Netflix OSS stack and Consul.
• Cloud Foundry has also had one heckuva year! Late last year we started seeing the first trickle of Cloud Foundry v2 and this year we saw that mature, and we also saw Cloud Foundry v2.1! Exciting work is ongoing already for the next generation Cloud Foundry; it's a bottom-up rewrite of all the components in blazing-fast Go that provides a runtime ("Lattice") that can be used independant of the higher PaaS-y bits. Cloud Foundry, of course, is an ideal target for Spring Boot and Spring Cloud-based applications. Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the shrink-wrapped distribution of Cloud Foundry, has grown by leaps and bounds. Coming soon: tiles and support for Spring XD and Spring Cloud! And, of course, we couldn't finish this paragraph without mentioning perhaps the most exciting thing of all: the Cloud Foundry Foundation is now fully operational!

What a ride! I'm as eager as you are to see what we could possibly top all of this in 2015! Now then, without further ado, let's quickly take an (abbreviated) look at some of the links this week.

• Just in time for the new year, the amazing and inimitable Spring project lead Juergen Hoeller announced Spring 4.1.4, 4.0.9, and 3.2.13
• Our pal Nicolas Frankel has a very nice post on Spring's new support for Optional<T> dependencies - InfoQ has Rossen Stoyanchev's SpringOne2GX 2014 talk on Spring 4 web applications, now available
• Spring I/O, the Madrid-based conference for Spring users, has announced their next year's show. I personally missed the show in this last year and am glad to have it back!
• The Kielczewski.eu blog has has a very thorough post on building a secure web application with Spring Boot. Nice job!
• David Kiss has a nice post on processing a Twitter feed with Spring Boot (and Spring Social)

That was fun! I hope you've enjoyed this walk down memory lane. It's always nice this time of year. I'm excited for the next installment of This Week in Spring, too! It will mark (roughly) four years of uninterrupted installments! What a rush!

I'm sure I speak on behalf of all the Spring team when I wish you a very, very Happy New Year! C'ya in 2015!