Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! I was in London, last week, for Devoxx UK. The show was a rousing success all around. I gave a talk, a workshop, and was delighted to participate in the closing keynote, too! This week I'm in Kraków, Poland, for Devoxx Poland (né 33rd Degree) which seems to be an amazing success as well! I want to thank the organizers (Mark Hazell and Grzegorz Duda of Devoxx UK and PL respectively) for inviting me - I haven't had this much fun in a while and I love the communities that both events serve.

In addition to being in the keynote, I was privileged enough to be in this keynote-selfie for a brief moment where Arun Gupta, left, took a moment to recognize recently nominated Java Champions (second-to-left) Trisha Gee, and David Blevins and myself). Thanks very much, Arun! I post it here because it's pretty darned special to me. ;-)

So, that said, on to that which is most special: the tide of awesome that is the great stuff in this week's This Week in Spring!

• Spring XD ninja Marius Bogoevici announced Spring Integration Kafka 1.2. The new release includes support for Kafka 0.8.2, performance improvements and improved documentation. All in a worthwhile and recomended upgrade!

• Spring guides ninja Greg Turnquist looks at the Spring team's Java 8-first approach and then announces that the epic guides have been moved to Java 8 by default.

• There's a nice introduction by Biju Kunjummen to Spring Cloud Eureka and the Spring Cloud Config Server over on DZone - as succint as it is useful!

• Our resident Spring Boot sorceror, Phil Webb, looks at the spring-boot-devtools in this amazing blog post. Seriously, go read this. I'll wait.. (did you watch the video? isn't that crazy cool?)
• Big-data doc Dr. Pollack just announced Spring XD 1.2 GA, Spring XD 1.1.3, and the Spring XD Flo beta. There's so much cool stuff in these releases! I particularly love the Spring XD Flo beta (there's even a super cool video included)!
• Spring XD ninja Glenn Renfro has been working on benchmarking (not benchmarketing) Spring XD and documents his journey in this first installment.

• Our pal Eugen Paraschiv is back at it again, this time with a list of super-convenient configuration options for Spring Boot applications. I'd definitely give this a review!

• One of the really nice bits about being here in Poland is that I finally got to meet Marcin Grzejszczak and the rest of the amazing 4Finance IT team! They're responsible for some really meaty contributions to Spring Cloud, including improvements to Spring Cloud Zookeeper and Spring Cloud Sleuth which provides tracing through microservices - exciting! These improvements are contributions from their other work - a project called micro-infra-spring - which are being merged into Spring Cloud. Dziękuję, my friends!

• Not nearly so awesome, but I'm pretty proud of the recently merged support for a Spring Cloud DiscoveryClient implementation for Cloud Foundry. This means that, soon, we'll have DiscoveryClient implementations for Netflix's Eureka, Zookeeper, Consul, Lattice and now Cloud Foundry!
• Speaking of Spring XD, I'd like to specifically call attention to these introductory videos, Building Streams and Advanced Stream Creation.