Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! Can you believe it's the 24th of December already? We're already two days into Chanukah, and one day away from Christmas, one day away from Kwanza, and two days away from Boxing Day, among other holidays. And just a week away from the brand new year, the first year of the new decade! I can't believe it! By the end of 2020, I'll have been (officially) part of the Spring team for 10 years and I'll have been doing these This Week in Spring roundups for 10 years too. What a privilege it's been to be a part of the team.

I love this time of year. It represents a time for me to be with my family, to celebrate, to rekindle my energies, and to gather for the new year. I am so excited to see what's coming in 2020! I'm also excited because next week, this column - like every year before it - will be a special This Year in Spring retrospective.

I wish you and yours the happiest of holidays! And now, without further ado, let's get to it!

• Spring for Apache Kafka 2.4 is Available
• Spring Cloud Roadmap and Hoxton and Greenwich Maintenance and EOL Announcements
• Spring Cloud Hoxton Service Release 1 (SR1) is available.
• I really enjoyed talking to Reactor teammate Simon Baslé in last week's A Bootiful Podcast.
• Spring Tools 4.5.0 released
• Spring for Apache Kafka 2.4 Release Candidate
• The Baeldung site has a nice look at Spring's @RequestParam annotation
• The Java guides have a nice example of Spring dependency injection, complete with an example
• Greg Whitaker has a nice example of using per-request RSocket Metadata in Spring Boot
• I like Greg Turnquist's video on testing with Spring Boot
• The new Spring Tools 4.5.0 ships on top of the latest Eclipse 2019-12 edition - get the bits while they're hot!
• Spring Cloud Circuit Breaker for Resilience4j now available !
• Good news everybody! The support channel for Azure Spring Cloud is now available!
• An interesting post on the Spring Boot starter parent