Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! What a week! This week I'm in Kansas City for the 6,000+-strong developer conference of a single company's developers and then it's back to New York City for QCon NYC where I'll be talking up building cloud-native applications with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud. If you're in either place be sure to reach out to me and let's talk shop (Spring, and, optionally, in Kansas City, BBQ..)

• Spring co-founder and project lead Juergen Hoeller put together two must-read posts this week: the first looks at Java 8 and Spring 4 adoption. ALSO, much, much, much more importantly: HE MENTIONED THIS WEEK IN SPRING :D #WIN.
• Juergen also posted is one of my favorite in years, a brutally honest look at the Java EE 7 landscape and the depressing lack of (big-vendor) supported implementations options for production-supported Java EE containers. You know, the man has a point..
• The amazing Dr. Pollack (see above!) announced Spring XD 1.2 RC1. The new release is packed with lots of new stuff including an Apache Ambari plugin to package and deploy Spring XD into production, new analytics, new features and performance improvements for the Apache Kafka support, improved HA configuration for RabbitMQ, Sqoop metastore support, and a lot more! Check it out!
• Check out this post by Spring XD ninja Janne Valkealahti to learn more about the Apache Ambari deployment options for Spring XD.
• Spring and Spring Boot ninja Stephane Nicoll just announced Spring Boot 1.2.4
• Sébastien Deleuze just released a must-read post on Spring framework 4.2's upcoming CORS support. This looks so cool!
• Our pal Jacob Severson has a nice post on the recent addition of E-tags to Spring Data REST and on what they offer us developers

• Don't miss Jamie O’Meara's upcoming webinar on continuous integration with Jenkins, Spring and Cloud Foundry
• Check out Phil Dutson's upcoming webinar on moving .jsp and JSTL pages to Thymeleaf

• My pal James Ward has put together yet another brilliant post, this time on deployment circa 2005 vs. application deployment today. It has only the faintest to do with a specific Spring technology, but it's well worth a read.
• Check out this talk from Michael Nygard - author of the epic tome, Release It!, on why we need resilient software
• I loved Camille Fournier's interview on various consensus software (like ZooKeeper, and Etcd)
• I gave a talk at the local San Francisco Java User Group last month introducing Spring Boot and people seem to like it. I hope you will to.