Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As I write this, I'm in Chennai, India, en route to Bangalore, India for a day of exciting customer meetings and then I'm off to sunny Barcelona, Spain, for the epic Spring IO event! Then, this Friday, I'm off to Kiev, Ukraine, for JEEConf. If you're around, as always, don't be shy and say hi!. That said, let's get into it!

• The BIG news: Spring Cloud Brixton is now available! Get the bits from the Spring Initializr. If you'll permit a little back-patting, I submit that you might get a good feel for what concerns a technology like Spring Cloud addresses by reading this article I wrote and you'll learn how Spring Boot and Spring Cloud are used in this video. That said, grab the bits and go!
• Spring Cloud Stream 1.0.0 is here, at long last! Spring Cloud stream makes it simple to build collaborating messaging-based microservices.
• Spring Boot co-lead Phil Webb just announced that Spring Boot 1.4.0.M3 is now available, just in time for the Spring I/O event in Barcelona! There are a lot of great new features in 1.4, so make sure to try the bits early and often.
• Spring Security and Spring Session lead Rob Winch has just announced Spring Session 1.2.0.RELEASE. This release includes loads of cool stuff.
• Spring Integration lead Gary Russell just announced Spring Integration 4.3.0.RC1 (the last RC! so get the bits and kick the tires!)
• Spring IO Platform lead Andy Wilkinson has just announced Spring IO Platform 2.0.5. This release includes a few interesting library updates, including Spring Boot 1.3.5.RELEASE and Spring AMQP 1.5.6.RELEASE.
• Not one to rest on their laurels, the Spring Security team just announced Spring LDAP 2.1.0.
• I really enjoyed this blog on using Pivotal's Concourse CI pipeline tool with Cloud Foundry
• Pivotal's very own Richard Seroter did a nice (albeit .NET-colored) comparison of messaging technologies RabbitMQ, NATS, and Apache Kafka
• This post on using the Groovy-language Spock with Spring Boot 1.4's new testing features is boss-sauce!
• The folks at Takipi released an interesting post wherein they compared and discovered the top 100 most widely used Java projects. Naturally, Spring and the various Spring modules featured very prominently, accounting for 44 of the top 100!