Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring!

If you're in the bay area this week, I'll be speaking at the Netflix OSS meetup in Los Altos talking about Spring Cloud on Wednesday and at Pivotal San Francisco's Open-Source Hub on the amazing Spring Session project on Thursday. I hope you'll join me for either or both! It's sure to be fun!

As usual, we've got a lot to cover, so let's get to it!

1. My pal (and Spring Boot co-founder!) Phil Webb and I gave the introduction to Spring Boot lesson at SpringOne2GX 2014 - check it out! Hopefully you'll have as much fun as we did! :)
2. DZone have published two nice Developers of the Week profiles, one for the good Dr. Dave Syer and one for Spring Batch lead Michael Minella
3. Adib Saikali put together a really nice article on InfoQ introducing the ways that Java 8 and Spring 4 win.
4. Readers of this roundup will know that I love me some JHipster, and so I am super excited to have JHipster founder Julien Dubois contribute a guest post introducing the project for us this week!
5. InfoWorld's James Donelan's post on keeping REST APIs simple is a great read, even if it has nothing to do with Spring, specifically.
6. Check out Kenneth Kousen's SpringOne2GX 2014 talk, The Quest for the Holy Grails, which serves as an introductory primer on using Grails.
7. Grails ninja Jeff Scott Brown's SpringOne2GX 2014 talk, RESTful Grails 2, is definitely worth a watch.
8. Check out Grails project-lead Graeme Rocher's very cool SpringOne2GX 2014 preview of the amazing stuff coming in Grails 3!
9. Peter Niederwieser's SpringOne2GX 2014 talk, Testing Java, Groovy, Spring and Web Applications with Spock
10. Spring Data ninja just announced Spring for Apache Hadoop 2.1
11. Are you getting your weekly Cloud Foundry After Dark? This last week was a stellar week to review!
12. Spring Integration ninja Artem Bilan just announced the Spring Integration Kafka 1.0 GA is now available! Check it out!
13. I really dig the Code and Notes blog's post on building client-side applications and integrating with Spring Security's CSRF protection
14. You know, I've been pretty surprised that even some very seasoned Spring developer don't know about Spring 4's amazing Optional<T> support as it applies to Java configuration. Check this Gist out for how you can inject unknown quantities of beans.
15. I really enjoyed Martin Fowler's writeup of the idea of a data lake. At Pivotal, we love our data lakes and we work hard to build the tools to plunge their data-rich depths!