Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Amsterdam, Holland to speak at the local Spring User Groups and with local companies, and then it's off to Krakow, Poland, Los Angeles, USA, Berlin, Germany and finally Seoul, South Korea! If you're in any of those regions, hit me up. Anyway, there's a lot of good stuff to get into this week so let's get to it!

• Spring Batch and Spring Cloud Task lead Michael Minella just announced Spring Cloud Task 1.0.0.RC1
• Spring Data ninja Mark Paluch just announced Spring Data Hopper SR2
• Spring Cloud cofounder Spencer Gibb just announced Spring Cloud Brixton.SR1
• the CodeCentric blog is back at it again, this time with a post on validation and custom SOAP faults
• I answered this question about Spring Boot's use of Maven starter dependencies
• I dig this blog introducing a custom, albeit alternative, way to do JWT (JSON Web Tokens) with Spring Cloud-based microservices. I wonder why they didn't use JWT with Spring Cloud Security, instead?
• this blog is a nice followup to this post on using Spring Security and JWT
• Our friend Michael Simons has put together a great post on the NB-Spring Boot plugin for Netbeans
• I don't know if I would call this complete, but it is exhaustive! Well done Dinesh, on this lengthy introduction to Spring Boot
• Hah! I was just thinking about writing this blog yesterday! I was giving a demo and Cloud Flare started misbehaving - the result was that the otherwise bulletproof and load-balanced application running the Spring Initializr was basically useless. So I just did what anybody would: git clone 'd the project and ran the application locally. It's a trivial Spring Boot application, after all. I'm glad I don't have to, though, as this Mr. Haki's blog has done a very good job!