Welcome to another edition of This Week in Spring! As usual, we've got a lot to cover, so let's get to it!

I want to encourage everyone to join me on the 21st (this Thursday!) for my webinar, Have You Seen Spring Lately?. If you haven't been paying very deep attention to everything that's happening in the wide world of Spring since we became part of the Pivotal adventure, this is the one to watch! And even if you have, I'll bet you'll learn about something new and exciting, anyway. :) C'ya there!

1. We published an article - Have You Seen Spring Lately? - to accompany the webinar today on the Pivotal blog.
2. Mark Baars has just announced that we've just added Big Data with Hadoop and Pivotal HD to our training. Awesome!
3. Spring Data ninja Thomas Risberg has just announced that the 1.0.2.GA release of Spring for Apache Hadoop is now available!
4. Spring XD ninja Gunnar Hillert has just announced that Spring XD 1.0.0.M4 has just been released. The new release is packed with a lot of new things, so definitely check this release out!
5. Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke and Spring Data Couchbase lead Michael Nitschinger have just announced the availability of milestone two for the Spring Data Couchbase module! Michael also followed up with an initial, but promising, pull request for Spring Boot support for Spring Data Couchbase, too! :)
6. Excited about the recent Reactor 1.0 release and want to learn more? Check out the upcoming webinar featuring Reactor lead Jon Brisbin on December 3, 2013! I'll be there, eagerly listening, and I hope to see you there, too.
7. Spring and Cloud Foundry ninja Matt Stine's doing a webinar on December 10th called Spring with Immutability that will introduce how Spring can help with item #15 in Josh Bloch's canonincal Effective Java book: minimize mutability.
8. The replay for the SpringOne2GX2013 session from New Relic: Troubleshooting Live Java Web Applications is now available online.
9. Spring Data GemFire 1.3.3 has been released!. Don't quite have a release note for it, yet, though.
10. Check out this demo of Pivotal CF - the turnkey Cloud Foundry in a box for on-premises deployment - in action.
11. Using Redis? We love Redis! We found this great post from a few years ago with various uses cases readily solved with Redis. Enjoy!
12. Pinterest just launched their first web API. There's nothing Spring-related about this mention, yet, but I'm just throwing this out there because I'm taking bets on how soon we'll see someone in the community create a Spring Social Pinterest binding! :)
13. Friendly reminder: you can get a lot of cool Spring / Pivotal stuff from Homebrew to flesh out your Java stack:

    $ brew tap pivotal/tap; $ brew install springboot springxd rest-shell maven groovy redis rabbitmq tomcat

14. I really enjoyed this sort of look behind the curtain with Spring team engineer Greg Turnquist.
15. The Spring Exchange, put on by our friends at Skills Matter, took place in in London recently. There were many great talks, and most (all?) of it has been recorded and put online! Enjoy!

On behalf of module lead Michael Nitschinger, I am pleased to announce the availability of milestone two of the Spring Data module for Couchbase.

This new release brings both feature enhancements and bugfixes, taking the library full steam to a release candidate soon. Highlights of this release are custom @View annotations on repository finder methods and better marshaling support for dates, enums and class types. Also, the underlying Couchbase Java Client has been updated to the latest 1.2.2 versions, bringing better rebalance stability and performance improvements. This M2 release is available from the Spring IO milestone repository…

The final month of the year is coming and you might still have some training budget left to start the year 2014 off as a Spring master. To help you out we have made a discount available for all of our developers. Simply use the code springtime in the referral code field when registering for a Spring training* to get a 20% discount on the list price. Our full schedule for December is:

Core Spring

Australia & Asia

• 02 - 05 December: Core Spring in Bangalore
• 02 - 05 December: Core Spring in Melbourne
• 03 - 06 December: Core Spring in Kuala Lumpur
• 09 - 12 December: Core Spring in Hong Kong
• 09 - 12 December: Core Spring in Wellington
• 16 - 19 December: Core Spring in Sydney
• 17 - 20 December: Core Spring in Pune
…

We are happy to announce the Spring for Apache Hadoop 1.0.2 GA and 2.0 M2 milestone releases.

Both of these releases provide bug fixes, upgraded Spring project versions and support for the new Pivotal HD 1.1 release. The 1.0.2 release adds support for the new Hadoop 2.2 stable release. The 2.0.0.M2 release provides support for CDH4 YARN clusters and an improved implementation for the HdfsResourceLoader (this implementation will be back-ported to the next 1.0.3 GA release).

We continue to provide version specific artifacts with their respective transitive dependencies in the Spring IO milestone…

The Spring XD team is pleased to announce that Spring XD 1.0.0 Milestone 4 is now available for download.

Spring XD makes it easy to solve common big data problems such as data ingestion and export, real-time analytics, and batch workflow orchestration. This release includes several notable new features:

• Batch Processing UI
• Improved Type Conversion
• Composite Modules
• Improved DSL parsing and Tap functionality (Note: breaking syntax change)
• New sources: Reactor based syslog, tcp-client
• Expression based processors can invoke a pre-registered JSON Path function.
• Pre-defined Batch jobs for HDFS to JDBC, HDFS to MongoDB, Files to HDFS, and Files to JDBC
• New commands for listing available modules and their definition.
• Deployment Scripts for EC2 in new project.
• Support for Pivotal HD 1.1
• Shell access to HDFS via WebHDFS protocol
…

Speaker: Jon Brisbin

Reactor is a succinct and powerful foundational library for building reactive, fastdata applications on the JVM. Although it is part of the Spring IO platform, the core Reactor libraries have no dependency on Spring. Above the core library, there's direct support for the Disruptor via the high-speed Processor abstraction which provides a Reactor API over the RingBuffer, first-class support for the high-performance JavaChronicle persistent message-passing library through the flexible PersistentQueue abstraction, first-class support for Groovy closures and @CompileStatic…

Speakers: Matt Stine

Readers of Josh Bloch's "Effective Java" are sometimes perplexed when they reach Item #15: "Minimize Mutability." If we are to minimize mutability, then obviously we must maximize immutability. While all Java programmers utilize immutable objects every day (e.g. java.lang.String), when asked to create our own immutable classes, we often hesitate. However, if we push through this hesitation, we'll reap the benefits of simpler reasoning about program correctness, free thread safety, and other benefits.

One of the primary issues faced by enterprise Java programmers seeking to…

Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013 in Santa Clara, CA.

Speaker: Ashley Puls, NewRelic

Operations teams tend to get nervous when debugging tools are installed on production systems. This is understandable as most people have had at least one debugging tool crash a system. However, are there tools that can be run in a production environment? This talk will cover methods and tools that can be used to uncover and resolve performance problems arising in Java web applications that use the Spring Framework. This talk will touch on a few common problems such as slow SQL, slow web page load times, blocked threads, and exceptions in the code. It will use a variety of diagnostic tools to examine these problems including log files, jmap, jvisualvm, and New Relic. Finally, the talk will evaluate the use of these tools in a production environment, separating them into what can and cannot be realistically used in live production web applications.

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I'm happy to announce that Reactor, a powerful foundational library for building reactive, fast data applications on the JVM has reached GA!

What is Reactor and why should I care?

Reactor provides the necessary abstractions to build high-throughput, low-latency--what we now call "fast data"--applications that absolutely must work with thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions of concurrent requests per second.

You should care about Reactor because modern applications with non-human consumers--like mobile phones and the apps that run on them--generate more data than traditional thread-per…